time flies

Julia Wendoline Green from Slough was my first love. She was sixteen and I was 3 years older. We went out together for 4 and a half years. It ended when I had to declare a new love, Christine, whom I married in 1965.

It broke my heart breaking the news to Julia - or Julie as she liked to be known  - just as it probably broke hers. Whether it was the right thing to do, well, I will never know. The marriage to Christine lasted 25 years. Julie and I were undoubtedly heading for the altar if events had not happened. Would it have lasted, would we be growing old together? Probably not, I’m not easy to live with.

Has Julie had a happy life with Myles Taylor her soldier husband? Did she have lots of babies and subsequently lots of grandchildren? Can’t help wondering. There’s one thing for sure, I would not recognise her now, nor her me. Time will have taken it’s toll on sweet sixteen and handsome young nineteen.

Things were different in those days, so no we didn’t. Girls wore cast iron knickers then, and Christine, my wife to be, was no exception. It all seems a bit silly today when you consider just ten years later the girls were at it like rabbits. Those ‘girls’, now in their mid fifties will confess to multiple pre-marital sexual relationships or encounters, I know, I’ve had a few of them. Unfortunately the bloom of youth had long passed by then, because it was when I was in my fifties that I ’sowed the wild oats’ that I couldn’t when I was young.

As for Julia Wendoline Taylor (nee’ Green) I have quite a lot of cine film footage of her in the bloom of her youth and it would be nice to send her a video of it all. She never saw it in the first place - I didn’t have a projector until later.

When I was a lad in the fifties there was no such thing as ‘Trick or Treat’. What there was in Leeds was something called ‘Mischief Night’. I think that this was a northern thing because since I came south I asked friends about it and they had never heard of ‘Mischief Night’.

It was a bugger living up north. You know the story; we lived in a hole in the road and ate gravel for supper etc, just as Monty Python described.

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Ken Schueler was a 6′-3″ tall, lumbering, gruff man who had been brought into Phoenix Rubber by his pal George Clarke. He was a bluff northener from Hull in Yorkshire and that didn’t help the existing mainly southern staff to warm to him.

On the contrary he was generally disliked and sometimes feared. For those of us who worked close to him it was a different matter. (more…)

I didn’t realise it at the time but George William Kenneth Schueler was almost like a father to me. He certainly took me under his wing and was probably the only man whom I can say had any real influence on my life. I can’t say my father had much influence. We were at loggerheads most of the time, but then I feel he didn’t actually ever know who I was in a way. I suppose the ‘Phoenix Years’ were the most influental time in my life.

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In the early fifties you had to go on a waiting list in order to buy a new car. In 1951 my father got his first car. It was a Ford Prefect. I remember coming home one Thursday from school and seeing it standing on the drive. It was sort of dark ‘yucky’ green and the registration number was NUM 795. Funny, isn’t it? I can only remember two registration numbers and that was one and the other was my own first car. (more…)