Taking my wife and toddler to a new home in a new town that we hadn’t seen before and for which we had to head to the council offices to get the keys shows our naiveté, our immaturity and our boundless belief that good things would happen. And they did. Of course, during our six years there, life à la Swindon was not without its fair share of ups and downs.
The estate was on the edge of the town. It was a green-field site and its inhabitants were a motley collection, made up of people from Rotherham (in the North), Swindon (in the West) and Londoners. The Plessey company was merging two factories and Rotherham-based ‘Plugs and Sockets’ workers were asked to move to Swindon and merge with the Wiring division. Rotherham types who declined, left housing for Londoners alongside Swindonians entitled to community housing. So we were a mixture of white collar and blue collar workers from diverse backgrounds.
On my left was Harry Millard, ex London, a marketing manager for Square D, a company associated with Plessey. On my right was (we’ll call him) Sid from Swindon, who kept down 9 jobs in 13 weeks and who at the sight of us digging over the ground removing cement and odd bricks in order to plant daffodils matched us by going to Fine Fare and buying a handful of plastic ‘daffs’ and salting his plot with them. Job done!
I started out as a technical clerk. ‘Technical’ meant a half guinea (ten shillings and sixpence, 53p new money, $0.70) more per week. Then this Grammar school boy went to night school to earn an electrical engineering certificate. At the same time I moved over to a drawing board (Plessey’s Aircraft wiring division) and in between drawing plugs and electrical diagrams for Concorde, English Electric Lightning aircraft and other diverse projects, I morphed into the office’s cartoonist.
They look just like scribbles now but they were the forerunner to later cartoons
On Whit Sunday 1960 I was sitting out in the sunshine, working from a 6” x 3” newspaper cutting and copying the picture below: ‘Wild White Horses’ as a present for my wife. Harry next door saw it and pointed out that my version omitted the three horses on the horizon. He had seen the actual picture in a window in ‘Old’ Swindon – the elite part of town. Having to see for myself I had to drive there and note the element I had nearly missed, before I could finish the picture.
The picture in the Daily Express and my (now-weatherbeaten) version
Once completed, Harry said ‘Let’s sell paintings’. He was to make the frames, I paint the pictures. We made our first sample. When I went among the factory workers I got orders for ten pictures the first day and Harry said ‘I can’t spare the time’. So that left me to painting pictures, making the frames, painting the frames and hiding the drying frames from my ‘touchy feely’ baby son.
What was on the showcard’s reverse - my first Chinese horse painting
The picture that started out on the back of the promotional showcard ultimately became the mainstay of my more than 400 pictures which I painted over the next few years.
Of course the pictures didn’t have such an illustrious backing and the buyers would have been surprised if there had been a bathing beauty on the rear side, but they bought them nevertheless. Cats, dogs, kittens, puppies made up the numbers – even pictures of the Beatles.
We eventually bought our first house and moved away; Harry (who became godfather to my future daughter) and his family also moved elsewhere. Where are you Harry? I read that Carl James a later inhabitant of his house was murdered in 2007 by a friend – some friend!
And when I passed through the town many years later it had changed immeasurably. In fact I got lost. The estate had expanded so much that I didn’t recognize it. Even as the town had been growing and aiming for city status, I had got itchy feet, wanting to head back to ‘the smoke’ – London.
I see from a recent birthday present from my son that he and I saw our first football match together in 1966, when he was 8. It was about the time we were to leave the ‘wilds of Wiltshire’.
My son’s reminder to me of our first father and son football outing.
I see from the programme that the February match was against Swansea Town, who like Swindon had been relegated to Division III that year. And when I Googled the website for the result I was amused at the subhead to Swindon Town FC.co.uk which read ‘A history of the 56th best football team in England’. You could have fooled me. I was sure they were 57th. Oh the match ended 2-2 by the way and another 3 years before they caused the upset of the year by beating Arsenal 3-1 in the Football League Cup Final. That alone would have upgraded them to being number 1, I would have thought.
But by then my career had taken another turn and painting and soccer-attendance were temporarily on a back burner.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment