A Hard Man
Cliff prided himself on being a hard man. Early life had prepared him well. His Dad was an unemployable drunkard and Cliff had known real hunger during his childhood for whatever money his mother was able to earn by taking in washing, his father drank away.
The family was constantly in debt and they were no strangers to the bailiffs. Many was the time they were turfed out on the street and had to rely on friends for a bed or rather a floor to sleep on. The iniquitous 'Poor Laws' were still operative.
The choices before them were the workhouse or starve. Once his mother applied for assistance from the 'Board of Guardians'. The manner of their refusal made him bitterly opposed to any form of charity. His favourite maxim was, ‘It’s as cold as charity and you can’t get colder than that.’
What he couldn’t understand was his Mam’s continued devotion to her husband in spite of penury. Perhaps it was because he was a handsome well set up chap, unlike his son.
Occasionally when his father obtained casual work, scene shifting at the 'Grand Theatre' on Radford Road, Cliff would wait outside to wheedle money from his father before it was spent in the gin palace next door. If successful he would run, as fast as his short legs could carry him, to the butchers for a parcel of bits.
School added to life’s lessons for he was regularly beaten as were most boys of his age. He was often made late by having to collect and deliver the washing but it was fighting which most often resulted in a caning.
His problem was his size. He was short and skinny so naturally his classmates picked on him. That wasn’t the only incentive to fight. He had a younger brother who was asthmatic any one who touched Earnest had to have a pasting.
Cliff dreamt of being a footballer and played for ‘The Hyson Green Boys Club.’ Unfortunately he retaliated to fouls with his fists.
If there was one thing he owed his Dad it was lessons in fighting for when sober he took pride in teaching Cliff to stand up for himself. Throughout his life he believed the only way to deal with a bully was to stand up to him and give as good as you got.
After he left school he worked in a Nottingham lace factory. By this time his father had joined the army and was making a success of being a solder. He rose through the ranks to Company Sergeant Major; which proved it was unemployment that drove him to drink and not drink that made him unemployable.
That was Bill Green’s opinion and he was the Union Rep and knew about these things. He lent Cliff a copy of a book by a chap named Karl Marx and from then on Cliff blamed all society’s ills on ‘The Capitalist System.’
Following his father’s footsteps he went on a drinking spree with a pal during which both got tattooed down ‘The Shades’. Unfortunately both had the same girl’s name inscribed on their arms. When they finished laughing they both signed up before staggering home to bed.
It was tea time before he awoke. Someone was clanging an anvil in his head and his throbbing arm was the size of a prize marrow. He felt his way down the stairs to the kitchen to slosh cold water over his head.
Memory returned slowly. What had he done? Was Len feeling as bad? Len! It was a knife in his stomach. Lizzie was the name Len had tattooed. Was he moving in on him? Cliff had set his sights on Lizzie from the first day he saw her walking on the Forest with her family. She looked so clean and pretty in her white pinny and her brown ringlets reached to her waist.
He made a friend of her brother and had managed to speak with her quite a few times. Now he must let her know how he felt before he left.
He walked to town and waited by the staff entrance of the store where she worked. The rain plastered his hair, he turned up his collar. By the time Lizzie came out the water squelched in his boots but she let him walk her home and promised to write if he wrote first. Suddenly he was six foot tall.
The war ended and he was demobbed. Back home, after he resumed work, fate had another smack at him. He trapped his hand in the rollers of a pressing machine. His employers were very sympathetic; promised him a job for life. No compensation, of course, for he had not lost a digit. The fact that his right hand had been reduced to a claw was immaterial.
Determined to overcome his handicap, Cliff refused all offers of being trained to use his left hand. To be ‘cack handed’ was a disability in itself. They told him his right hand was useless but he proved them wrong. He hated his deformity and kept his hand in his pocket when he wasn’t using it which earned him a reputation of being a ‘surly bugger’
Eventually he returned to work. His employers kept their promise; offered him a job sweeping the factory floor at half the pay he had been earning. Telling his employers to ‘Stuff their job,’ could have been disastrous but either by luck or determination he got work as a delivery sideman and soon cajoled or bribed the driver to teach him to drive. Drivers earned more than sidemen.
Lizzie married him and never flinched from his hand. He made her a promise, ‘We’ll never be poor’ and when his employer went out of business he turned up at the bus station at four o’clock every morning waiting for a chance to take the place of an absent or late driver.
Eventually he was taken on and lost no time in joining the Union, becoming first, collector, later Union Rep and eventually Chairman of his branch.
The Union took over his life and he was at a ‘Midnight Mass Meeting’ when his second child was born. Like many of his fellow workers he didn’t want strike action. ‘The threat of strike,’ he said, ‘was a weapon, use it and the fight was lost.’
Strike action was taken and lost. From now on Cliff had a burning ambition, to be his own boss. He saw that as the only way to security and prosperity. His future lay in a shop of his own. He saved every penny he could spare, his wife saved her Co-op Divi’ and in the 1930’s they rented shop premises undeterred by the previous tenant's bankruptcy.
Yes, he was a hard man, but all men have their weaknesses and when sons were obliged to supplement their parents’ pensions, Cliff voluntarily contributed to that of his in-laws.
He continued to work on the buses whilst his wife worked in the shop. It was hard work and it was several years before any profits were made. One of the first large expenditure was to replace the black kitchen range with a ‘Cook and Heat’. It was fitted into the alcove which they had tiled with smart green ceramic tiles.
A few days later they heard a strange noise behind the tiles. They called the fitter back. ‘It’s a bird,’ he said. ‘Nowt you can do about it. Don’t let it bother you it will soon die.’
The distressful cries did not stop and our hard man borrowed some tools and chipped away until he had made a hole big enough to release the bird. His excuse, the noise got on his nerves. He made no answer to the suggestion that he could have lit the boiler although later he said he hadn’t thought of it.
He would never have admitted to a soft spot for animals and once he attempted to drown a litter of kittens. After a short while he lifted the lid of the bucket in which he had placed them. The kittens were swimming desperately. He fetched them out, towelled them dry and fed them with a medicine dropper.
When ‘The Second World War’ began he thanked the God he had rejected, that his sons were too young to go. Eventually they both were called up.
His contribution to the war effort was to work more shifts and to urge his fellow workers to keep the buses running. Sometimes on a Monday he would come home furious because some miners had not turned up to catch the early bus for work.
He never renounced his antagonism to charity but when a local family lost everything in a fire he enlisted the help of ‘The Nottingham Evening Post’ to raise a collection to which he contributed.
Cliff never did make fortune but he became his own boss - if you discount his Mrs.
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