Johnny Cigarini Read Free Page A

Margate on television in a contest called ‘Beat That Town!’. It involved a number of entertainers, like singers, dancers and a Hawaiian guitarist. Going to the TV studios in Manchester was the furthest away I had been from Margate and I really did love that trip. I remember the journey and how shocked I was when one of the dancers went into the toilet on the train with a man she had just met. I didn’t know anything about sex in those days – why would I? I was still eleven and living with Granny. For the show, the whole of the accordion band were dressed up as little Dutch boys and girls, with curled-up hats, plaits and clogs. I have a photo of the band taken from a little black and white TV screen, and I’m in the corner grinning from ear to ear – fame!
    Television was not something we had at home, on Addiscombe Road, Margate. In fact, there was only one television on the entire street. It belonged to a family with a son who was my age, so every Saturday and Sunday evening I would go there to be with him and we’d plonk ourselves in the front room on the floor and stare at the television in amazement. It was raised on stilts and must have been like one of those old classic images of the kids sitting too close to the screen. The family would give me a Wagon Wheel chocolate biccy and a packet of crisps, things I rarely had in my house. I remember the excitement of
Bonanza
and
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
. Even in black and white, television was thrilling in those early days – totally and utterly thrilling.
    Our street also lacked cars in the 1950s, but the family with the telly had a motorcycle and sidecar, and that was all of the available transport on Addiscombe Road. Our house was a basic two-up, two-down terraced house, with a rear extension and an empty field opposite the house where every year a circus would pitch its tent. I remember the knocks at the door from “the man with the bucket” asking for water for his elephants. Eventually, the council built a housing estate on the field and the circus was no more, but the donkeys for the children’s rides on the beach would still come and pass our house. My job was to rush out and scoop up their droppings to scatter on the roses.
    My sister Maria had Sundays off from the salon and she would visit us for Sunday lunch. My job for the meal was to make the cream and I’d use full fat gold-top milk. Back then, milk came in glass bottles and the different colour top indicated the different type. First I’d boil the milk, let it settle overnight, then the next day skim the top off and compress it through this big old machine of Granny’s. It would come out the other end as Cornish clotted cream. Beautiful. I’d help make the mint sauce too, by picking the mint from the back garden. As you can see, life was different in those days, in all the little ways. We had a toilet outdoors, for example, and there was no such thing as Andrex, just a metal hook, and on it, shreds of newspaper – usually the
Daily Mirror
.
    In the summer we brought bed-and-breakfast holidaymakers into the house, mainly car workers from the Midlands. We would get the same families every year but, thinking back, I can’t imagine now how they’d have all fitted into our small house, with the whole visiting family using just one room. I had another job as well: to take up the jug of hot water for guests to wash in the morning, and then empty the bedpan full of urine. Guests were never allowed to use the house’s only bath. It was a tin tub, which was in a shed out back – that was just for us. It was a small tub, and hung on a nail when we weren’t using it. I remember Granny and I filling the tub with kettles for our weekly soak, and we would, of course, both use the same water. We were so excited when we got a gas hot-water boiler over the tub. To us, it was the most tremendous and dazzling of modern inventions.
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