Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs Read Free Page B

get started on his car again. From that day to the day when we finally left our prefab, about ten years later, he continued to wash and polish his car. It stood outside, never leaving the kerbside, gleaming in the sunlight as a fine tribute to Old Daddy Flat Cap and his dedicated hours of work.
    Although he never went anywhere in it, Old Daddy Flat Cap’s car was the only one parked in this stretch of road. Before the arrival of his magnificent red vehicle, not a single family owned a car in our part of the street apart from Peter, who kept a van in a lock-up garage behind his off-licence. During that period, everyone relied on public transport, even though we weren’t very well served by it in our area. Car-owning families were very much in the minority, certainly among the working-class families in that part of London.
    About the time I was born, the woman who lived next door to Old Daddy Flat Cap also had a baby. One day, she and Mum got talking and she said she was bringing up her child on dried milk. As a result of this, she had a lot of empty tins at home and asked Mum if she would like any as they made useful containers.After this conversation, her nickname fate was sealed and she became ‘Tin Tart’.
    The last house in the row opposite our prefabs was occupied by ‘Crafty’ and her husband and two sons. She got her nickname because Dad thought she had very shifty-looking eyes.
    Dad’s penchant for nicknames came from his great love of literature and literary devices. He was an avid reader, and many’s the time that, out of nowhere, he would suddenly burst into poetry and recite verses from classics by Scott or Lord Macaulay.
    His favourite was Vitai Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt, which he used to recite in full whenever the fancy took him. He said he could always remember this poem because it was printed on a poster that used to hang in his school (Virginia Road School, Bethnal Green). I think it also appealed to his love of cricket as it began:
    There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
    Ten to make and the match to win –
    A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
    An hour to play and the last man in.
    Each verse finished with the line, ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’, which I think he took as his philosophy on life. I heard this poem so many times that I could also recite it in full by the time I went to school.
    This love of poetry and literature stood Dad in good stead as he won a couple of competitions using his literary skill. The first was when a company called Berkeley asked for anadvertising slogan for their new brand of luxury armchairs. His entry was:
    Berkeley Chairs beside the fire
    Make mum madam, make dad sire.
    Dad won the second prize of £5.
    He also won a second prize of £5 when a new chocolate biscuit called Bandit was launched. Once again, the competition was to find an advertising slogan and Dad came up with ‘ Bandit – Once tried always wanted’.
    The first major single event I can remember is the Festival of Britain. This took place over the summer of 1951, just after my fourth birthday, exactly one hundred years after the Great Exhibition of 1851, the intention of which had been to show that Great Britain was the world’s leading industrial country. The motive behind the 1951 Festival, however, was somewhat different.
    In the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of London was still in ruins as a result of the Second World War and redevelopment was badly needed. The Festival was intended to give Britons a sense of recovery and progress and to promote better-quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities. The Festival of Britain described itself as ‘one united act of national reassessment, and one corporate reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future’. Gerald Barry, the festival director, described it as ‘a tonic to the nation’. It gave a major boost to the nation’s