Memoirs of a Private Man Read Free Page B

four brothers, for whom she then became a permanent scrubber and cook and housekeeper. Eventually a child came – a boy – and they were able to afford rooms of their own, then a tiny house. They could do this because Evelyn got work at Lewis’s, the big Manchester store, first as an assistant in the dress department, then in the accounts department, where she established a reputation for efficiency and integrity. So began what must have been the best part of her life. Eventually they were even able to afford a small car; but her husband Arthur was always ailing – he worked in the cotton industry, and the flying dust affected his chest and made him a martyr to bronchitis. They always said that some day they would retire – like us – to the sea.
    Their son John was just too young for World War II but was conscripted at the end of it and drafted out to Egypt. When he was free he returned to England and to his work as a draughtsman. But a year after his return he developed a rare kidney disease and began to lose his abounding good health. The doctors could do nothing for him, and the War Office would accept no responsibility, as there had been a sufficient lapse between his discharge and the onset of the complaint for them to deny liability. Aware that he was dying, Evelyn put the situation to her boss at Lewis’s, saying that she had worked there for twenty-four years and could not afford to miss her pension, due when she had been there twenty-five. Her boss told her to take six months off to nurse her son. Which she did. And when he died she went back to Lewis’s to work out the final year. When it came to settling her pension she was summoned before the board of the company and told that, alas, although she had worked the full length of time, because there had been a break in the time, company rules made her ineligible for a pension. So she got no pension at all.
    I do not know if Lord Woolton, who by then was owner of Lewis’s, ever heard of this case, but I hope that whoever was responsible for that decision rots in Hell.
    A few years later Arthur died, but when I came to meet her again, Evelyn was in her mid-seventies, a cheerful, God-fearing, churchgoing, hard-working widow – her life in ruins behind her but not a trace of bitterness in her disposition. She lived from hand to mouth, helping other people, respectable, a lady of some small dignity. She had never owed a penny that she hadn’t repaid, never, I’m sure, committed a mean act or a petty one. Her main concern was that when she died she would leave enough money behind for a proper funeral. This in fact occurred recently.
Then he that patiently wants burden bears
No burden bears,
But is a King, a King.

Chapter Two
    My brother went to the Hulme Grammar School and I was destined for the Manchester Grammar, but at seven I got meningitis, and when I began to recover the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry about schooling, just concentrate on keeping him alive.’ So I was sent to Longsight Grammar School, which had moved into a vast house in Victoria Park and therefore was only five minutes’ walk away. I hated it.
    Whether such schools could exist today, with the Department for Education maintaining a supervisory interest, I don’t know. It was presided over by an extremely brilliant, extremely religious, extremely eccentric clergyman called Arthur Frederick Fryer who ran the school almost on his own, with the aid of his wife, a couple of women teachers, another man whose name I can’t remember – only his nickname, Snowball – and a couple of masters who came in occasionally.
    Running the school was almost literally true of A. F. Fryer. My memories of him seem chiefly to consist of seeing him in flight from one place to another, mortar board perilously perched, gown fluttering like the Witch of Endor. He was also immensely kind when his poisonous little charges gave him the opportunity to be.