The Silk Road and Beyond. Ivor Whitall

the beer on tap downstairs, we’d got hot water on tap in the bath upstairs! And . . . luxury of luxuries, it came with an indoor toilet and a chain pull flush! For us kids it was a different world as we also had unfettered access to a 2-acre field and large wood to play in.

      For a while life seemed good, but Dad wasn’t a well man, having a history of pancreatic problems. To add to his woes, in 1960 he was diagnosed with gallstones and taken into hospital for a routine operation to remove them. Seemingly on the mend, a month later, once again feeling poorly, he was re-admitted. At five in the evening, Mum phoned to ask how he was, to be told, ‘He is doing well Mrs Whittall,’ and, happy with the news, she went back to running the pub. An hour later the phone rang. It was the hospital, and I could literally see the blood drain from her face as she was informed her husband, my father, had died! Poor Mum was distraught; Dad, with his history of pancreatitis, had succumbed to a major haemorrhage.

      I was 14 years old and without a dad. To add insult to injury, facing my final year in school, Mum decided to move us away from all our friends and family to Pelsall, near Walsall. I felt like it was one disaster on top of another and it had a really negative effect on me. So much so that I had become an extremely angry young man. Without my mother’s knowledge, I left home and headed for the ‘bright lights’ of Blackpool, managing to find accommodation in a ‘doss house’ and a job at the infamous fun fair, working on the waltzer and big wheel. I’m not saying it was the making of me, as I was always independently minded, some might even say cussed, but my growing up was a short, sharp learning curve. I was not long a boy among men. In November, at the end of the 1961 season, my anger had dissipated enough for me to try and make a go of it back home with Mum.

      “Bloody hell! I certainly knew how to pick the jobs. Still, I was as fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.”

      I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I wanted to do but I had a good work ethic and was keen to earn money. For the next two or three years I tried my hand at anything and everything, which usually involved hard manual labour. From an ‘improver plasterer’, a posh word for a specialist labourer, to bread rounds man, where I passed my driving test, to delivering heat-treated metal fabrication in a Mini Pick-up, and the realisation I loved driving.

      Maybe the die was cast! I was still flitting from job to job and somehow found myself driving a small Thames Trader lorry, working as a coalman at the local Co-op coal yard. Hard work doesn’t begin to cover it. With soaking wet hessian sacks dribbling rivers of black dust down the back of your trousers and pointy lumps of steam coal trying to gouge a hole in your kidneys, bloody marvellous it wasn’t . . . But at least I was driving!

      Still unsure as to what I wanted to do employment wise, but certainly deciding that life as a perennially dirty coal man wasn’t the profession for me, I answered an advert from a local builder, Joe Giles, for a labourer/driver. Offering me nine old pence an hour more than I was already being paid, I jumped at it and one week later found myself at the wheel of a dilapidated petrol-driven four-wheeler. I was carting everything from sand and ballast to slabs and cement; this was fine until I realised it hadn’t any tipping gear and everything had to be shovelled or handballed, on and off!

      Hell! I certainly knew how to pick the jobs. Still, I was as fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.

      Slowly a hazy career path was opening up in front of me as my next job also entailed driving, this time for a steel stockholder. Once again I found myself delivering metalwork in an asthmatic four-wheeler. Loading and unloading was a serious business and executed by an ancient crane that would have done credit to a 1950s Meccano set. This was bolted to a static lorry parked at the back of the yard and was a serious danger to life and limb. Operated by compression, you wound it up with a cranking handle and then flicked over the lever hoping it would start. A puff of smoke and the distinctive sound of a single pot Lister meant it was up and running. It would lift relatively heavy objects with apparent ease, but try putting them down again! The operation required nerves of steel and perfect judgement as the cargo’s descent was only controlled by the operator, in this case me, working a manual choke brake attached to the cable. The whole kit and caboodle could quite easily, and often did, end up crashing onto the deck! It was a nightmare, and not for me as I valued my extremities too much.

      chapter two

      MARRIED TO THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS

      By now I was 19 and had left my youth behind. Although tall was never my thing, more like stocky, the attribute I was most proud of was my mane of dark, shoulder-length hair. It was 1965 and I’d moved back to the place I regarded as my spiritual home, Tean in Staffordshire. There I ‘renewed’ an acquaintance with Jenny, a girl I’d fancied when we’d both travelled on the same school bus five years earlier. Using the word ‘renewed’ is a bit of journalistic licence on my part, because when I first tried to engage her in conversation all those years ago, she totally ignored me and that, I’m afraid was the beginning and end of ‘our relationship’! This time, however, my endeavours were not to be denied. She was as beautiful as I remembered her; slim with long wavy blonde hair and blue eyes. She was perfect and agreed to meet me in the Gardeners Arms for a drink. I must have done something right because seven weeks later we were married!

      Our lives were changing and not long after the wedding, Jenny’s mum bought a guest house, in, of all places, Blackpool. My new wife was going to help run the place, so it looked as if I was going to have to find yet another new job, this time a ‘proper’ one, not working the fun fair dodgems and chatting up the girls.

      Casting about in the local Blackpool rag for driving jobs, I randomly selected an advert from the many on offer, John & C. Lowes, Builders Merchant and, rather than phone, I turned up at their yard asking if they had any driving vacancies.

      ‘Just a moment,’ smiled the receptionist. ‘I think we do, I’ll give Alf a call.’

      Alf Pye was a real old-school character. Born during the First World War, he always wore a worsted blazer and tie, and judging by the grilling he gave me, was going to make sure I was the right man for the job. He quizzed me about anything and everything until finally;

      ‘Right young man, have you driven tipper lorries?’

      Of course, I hadn’t.

      ‘Yes,’ I replied.

      ‘OK, Ivor isn’t it? The pay is 5s 7d (27p) an hour, with overtime at 7s (35p) an hour after 50 hours.’

      Once again I was driving another old banger – I seemed to attract them – and the job was carting mostly sand and bricks around south and central Lancashire. As it was a tipper, of course, I didn’t have to do a huge amount of shovelling!

      The one company artic was driven by a bloke called Derek, who was forever handing in his notice when his temper got the better of him but was back at work the following morning! It was a ten-year-old bonneted Leyland with vacuum brakes and air-operated windscreen wipers. You know, the ones that the faster you drive, the slower they swipe the screen clear, and conversely the slower you drive, the faster they operate. Then, when you’re nearly at a standstill, all you can see out of the screen is a blur of rubber screeching across the glass, setting your teeth on edge. Whose ridiculous idea was that? It was hooked up to a four in line flatbed with what’s called a Scammell coupling; the older guys will understand. It’s where you reverse under the trailer and the legs fold up automatically as you click onto the pin. There were no air lines to connect, just a bolt that when you depressed the foot brake it activated a mechanism that ‘applied’ the trailer’s brakes. For all the good they were you might as well have chucked a rubber anchor out of the window and hoped for the best. Fully loaded, driving this beast required a great deal of forward planning. Luckily they’ve been consigned to the annals of history now, as technology has moved on.

      I’d often looked at it and wondered. Then one afternoon, when once again Derek had stormed past, having handed in his notice for the umpteenth time, Alf collared me and asked me to pop into the office before I went home.

      ‘Derek’s handed his notice in again, and we need a load collected