I Could Have Been a Contender , livre ebook

Title Page
I COULD HAVE BEEN A CONTENDER

by
Eric Scott



Publisher Information
Published in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Eric Scott to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2013 Eric Scott
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.



Dedication
For my wife Dee, my daughters, Jenny,
Samantha, Miranda, and Kellie, and
all those who have helped make life’s
journey such a fascinating one for me.



CHAPTER 1
Gassed at the bottom, buried at the top
W ho am I? I am Eric Scott: Journalist, novelist, playwright. Home is Brisbane, Australia. I’ve had a hectic life and have sometimes been almost famous. If you Google me you’ll get a few thousand hits or so.
I have fallen dead drunk with superstars, dined with glamorous actresses, talked with the most famous people of stage and screen, had three novels and two books of one-act plays published and seen many of my children’s, teenage and adult plays performed on many stages - oh and I’ve had five wives.
I never quite made the celebrity list, but I could have been a contender if I had tried harder.
I was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up a gutter rat in Reigate Road, in the Nottingham suburb of Basford, England, which stood at the lower end of the working class scale.
Back then I was Eric Parrott, son of Ron and Edna Parrott kin to brother Ray and sister Glenys.
In 1939 Reigate Road was a unique place to grow up. The gasworks, which cooked gas from black coal residue sat at the bottom of this cobble- stoned, red-brick terrace house lined street, while the local cemetery loomed large at the top.
“Gassed at the bottom buried at the top” was the local saying.
In the middle of the street was Mrs Smith’s shop. A converted house that sold everything from bread and custard powder to the coveted Rowntree’s fruit gums. Mrs Smith had opening hours, but she was always happy to bring in a bit more business at the back door when she was officially closed.
On the bottom corner was the local grocery store. And on the other side stood a factory that manufactured wicker work, mainly baskets, and the windowless walls were great for bouncing footballs against.
After the gasworks had cooked the black coal; extracted the gas and piped it into houses for cooking and heating (and sometimes suicide) purposes, the residue became a smokeless fuel called coke. In those days there was no other type of coke even on the horizon!
On cold winter days we would queue-up for a hundredweight bag of coke to keep us warm for the week. And it didn’t always smell bad, just when the wind was in the wrong direction.
Conservation in those days had something to do with bottling fruit and making jam; and greenhouse gasses helped tomatoes grow in the greenhouse.
The cemetery held no ghostly fears for us. It was a good place to find flowers for the school’s annual Harvest Festival and the tall sandstone wall was a secure way for us to enter the fenced off grounds of the local cinema, an ornate shaped building called The Futurist. In those grounds grew the biggest and juiciest blackberries in the neighbourhood. We could also crawl into the depth of these monster plants and create cosy little dens.
The street was filled with an odd assortment of residents. There were reasonably well-off people whose boys wore pin-striped suits and others whose kids always had the seat of their pants torn and patched and sported grubby knees. The adults generally kept themselves to themselves, but on Saturday night there was sometimes an altercation in the street when language was foul, voices loud and fists flew.
The local pub, The Shoulder of Mutton , was just around the corner at the gasworks end of the street. It was no more than a couple of minutes walk (there anyway, sometimes it took longer walking back) from any house in the neighbourhood.
There was no problem with the children then, we simply went to the pub with our parents and sat with the other kids in the pub backyard eating crisps and drinking lemonade, dandelion and burdock or Tizer. Life was simple if not easy.
was there that my Dad used to send me with a jug for a pint of ale. Once I tried sipping it and didn’t like the taste. And I was staggered when I got home and Dad told me off for drinking his beer. I couldn’t fathom then how he knew; it was only a tiny sip!
The time was the beginning of World War 2. Windows were covered in black-out curtains so no chink of light could escape to show Jerry where to drop his bombs, and there were no street lights. Most of us kids - there were seven or eight little gutter rats - didn’t even know what street lights were. To us they were tall, green-painted poles fit for climbing and swinging on the ladder-support cross piece. They were remnants of the old days of gas lighting.
We all had fun, but some had more fun than others. My parents were strict when it came to bedtime. It didn’t matter that it was the height of summer and it never got dark. Seven-o-clock and we had to come in and go to bed.
On those nights I would lay awake for hours listening to all the other kids shouting and yelling and having a good time. It was a time of sheer frustration and boredom.
In general the war was fun, especially watching Spitfires and Messerschmitt warplanes dog-fighting in a clear blue sky, and we had a great time hiding under the kitchen table when the air-raid sirens went and the German bombers were roaring over head.
They actually dropped bombs on Nottingham, but they mainly fell in the River Trent, which in the moonlight the Germans mistook for a road. Our town suffered little damage and we were too young to wonder about what happened in London, even when we met the refugees; strange talking, pasty-faced youngsters, who were absolutely alien to us.
The adults, God bless them, were never eager to add fear to our already deprived lives.
We also had air-raid shelters - concrete bunkers at the bottom of the street - but we never used them - only for more nefarious activities like games of Doctors and Nurses with the little girl gutter rats.
My family had one real wartime shock though; Dad was conscripted into the army, despite being almost blind. Luckily for him some medic caught on to the fact that he couldn’t see more than two feet in front of him and would be more of a menace to his own comrades than the Germans. So he returned home to an eternally grateful wife who, as well as caring for her first-born, was nursing baby Ray.
Dad was a labourer. He could use a shovel as well as an Irish navvy. But he always said the best job he ever had was as drayman working for Shipstone’s Brewery. In those days, huge shire horses were still used to pull carts loaded with barrels of beer. His job was to help unload the barrels and roll them to hoists that lowered the barrels into the pub cellar.
Every day he would go off to work and we would sometimes see him sitting proudly, riding shotgun along with the driver. He loved his job, especially the free pint of beer he received at each stop.
The trouble was he never came home sober. So Mum eventually put paid to that and made him give up. He never stopped talking about that job until the day he died.
He was sharp as a tack, but his own upbringing and the great depression had left his education lacking. Despite his bad eyesight, he read all the newspapers from front to back. Even my weekly dose of comic books - Wizard and Hotspur - tended to be devoured before I got my hands on them He also had a good grasp of the political situation and was all for the working man, a strong unionist even taking on the job of shop steward at one time.
Dad’s poor eyesight wasn’t helped by pouring over the small print of the racing form every day. He had various systems, but was never a big winner - but then, with his sixpence each-way bets was never big loser either. He also had a “tough love” attitude to us kids. But I can never remember him laying a finger on any of us. Just a glance up from the newspaper was enough to make us behave. He also had a wicked, biting sense of humour. If I was bullied on the street and went home complaining that someone “had hit me”. His reply would always be: “well hit him back!”
We were poor, and we were lean and hungry - hunger pains were part of life at that time for everybody- but we never starved. And it wasn’t all about lack of money. There simply wasn’t enough food to go round and everything was rationed, bread was grey and coffee came only in bottles called “coffee and chicory essence”.
Nothing was ever wasted in our house. Leftover bread crusts and old bread were stored in a box until they had dried out and then used for a bread and milk breakfast. Potato peelings and vegetable scraps were given to local pig breeder, or boiled and mashed to be used as feed for backyard chickens.
The rear entry to our Reigate Road terrace house was reached by walking through the little alleyway in the middle of the block and then past the other house backyards. Ours was the last house in the block, so we had a wall separating us from next door on one side and at the bottom was a towering (to us little gutter rats) wall that separated the entire street from the next o