My grandmother Preston's cousins.

When I started Manor Road school I was worried about meeting a lad called John Jones. He was one year older than me, but we had had a fight at junior school and he said he would get me on the first day. On the first day there he was waiting, but instead of fighting with me again he put his arm round my shoulders and we remained friends for years.

My mother was still on to me about higher education and so for her sake I took the exam at Dudley Technical College. I passed and so now I have my name on the honours board at Manor Road in gold letters.

When I started at the college with my friend Jim Brown, the second class we took on the first day was PT. and this was the time I learned to be careful. We were standing about when this man came in. He was smaller than me, as I was quite tall for my age, and wore a large pullover. He did not look like a PT. instructor. Trust me, I made the big mistake of speaking out of turn and commented on him. Straight away he went to another room and came back with a pair of boxing gloves. He threw me a pair and told me to put them on. When he stripped off, I knew I should have kept my mouth shut. He had huge bulging muscles and when he had finished with me I hadn't. The good thing this did was clear the air and from then on we did lots of boxing and gymnastics together. He told me his first job was as a trapeze artist in the circus.

I spent two years at the college and in the second year I had my biggest surprise. In assembly on the first day we started back, the Headmaster would announce who would be head boy for the year. You are right, that year it was Stanley B. Smith. What a surprise! Without being big headed, I think I did the job very well.

When I left college at fifteen and a half, one of my grandmother's brothers got me a job as an apprentice at Lee Howle’s in Tipton. I had to start in the moulding shop, then the machine shop, and then the fitting shop. This job became very important during the 1939 war as I was fitting pumps for the Russians. They were used for pumping gun cotton. I went out on sites installing pumps and one job was at an American Army medical hospital in a place called Wolverley, Kidderminster. This was a place that I would later come to live at.

The job I had to do for the Americans was to replace old pumps with new ones. The pump house was in a five acre field and very close to the village. The smell was awful going on to the site as the manholes were overflowing onto the fields. When I went down to the job the pump house was clean but as the pumps were suspended into the sewage below I phoned the firm to tell them I wanted some workmen to clean the sewage out before I installed the new pumps. They sent me three Irish men from the Labour Exchange.

The job entailed using buckets on ropes. As the men empted the first buckets by the stream, they found that they contained silk handkerchiefs. Later I discovered that the American nurses used these instead of toilet paper. The three men would wash the handkerchiefs out and sell them at Kidderminster Market. Although the job I came to do took longer that it should have, the Irish lads made plenty of money.

As I have mentioned, years later I came to live in Wolverley and I heard the talk about the camp and the months they had to live with the smell. I never let on that I was in charge of the job!

I still went to night school at Dudley Tech and this corresponded with my job at Lee Howle’s. This work became very useful later on when I went to work as a Bevin Boy in the pits.

An advert from 1947.

The war broke out in 1939 while I was still at school. In 1941 the air raids started over the Midlands, Birmingham and Coventry, and then nearer West Bromwich. You could always identify the German bombers by the sounds their engines made. I cannot remember the exact day, but one came over and dropped a landmine. This was a large bomb on the end of a parachute. I think it was aimed at a large factory named W. G. Allen and Company. Luckily for us and Allens, it floated down and landed in a small quarry.

The trouble with landmines was that they were very quiet and you only knew where they were when you heard the explosion. One night, my grandmother was sitting with my younger brother Frank and myself in the kitchen. She sat next to the open fire, I was by the window and Frank was on the settee. There was a load explosion and the window blew out and landed on the kitchen table. The fire blew out and when the dust settled, grandmother was covered in so much dust she looked like a Kentucky Minstrel; very black! The blast went through the room creating a vacuum, then the bar windows blew out. Dad was sitting in the bar and he was the only casualty in the whole area, with a nasty cut on his arm.

At the time I said it was only a small bomb in the back yard, but when we went outside to the front road we saw all the windows were blown out and the curtains were blowing in the breeze. My cousin, Tom, and his family lived in the same area and their house was very badly damaged, so they came to live at the pub with us.

One night Tom asked me asked me to go with him because he had seen two girls and wanted me to ask them to go out with us. I said I would if I could choose which one of the girls I wanted. Tom must have been watching these girls because he knew when they would come out of the house. I went over and asked if they would like to come out with us. After a bit of time, Mary Knight, who would later become my wife, said "No", as they had arranged to meet some other boys.

Mary and her father.

One year later, as I was walking home from night school with friends, we meet a bunch of girls going our way. We started joking with them. As the group went their own way, I asked this nice girl if she was going my way, she said that she was and would not mind my company.

When we parted I told her that I had asked her out before, when she was with her friend Betty and she had said they were meeting two boys later that night. She told me then that they had not got to meet any boys. I asked her why they did not come out with us and she explained that she did not like us in the flat hats we were wearing.

After I had been going out with Mary for some time I told her that she was very lucky because the deal I had with Tom meant that I had first choice over the girls. I would have picked her friend, Betty Edwards, being a blonde! This did not go down very well but I am very happy that she did not give me up and finish a marvellous relationship.

I remember our first date. It was on a Sunday and I could not think where to take her. I made a big mistake by asking Tom. He suggested the Hippodrome as there was a good play on. The play was called The Flea and it was terrible. We didn't stay and came out after the interval. Years later when we were married we would have a good laugh, especially Mary, because I bought her a box of chocolates and during the play would hand her one without handing her the box. She said she had never had a boyfriend that just handed her the chocolates and not the box. I was just testing her.

It makes you wonder why times have changed so much and in my opinion not for the better. As I have said, the bar in the pub was used mainly by men. The women came to the outdoor to get beer to take home. Children were not allowed in and us teenagers would go to the local milk bar. The churches and chapels were the places that we used for games etc. You could find snooker, dominoes and quite a number of football teams.

I think the chapel in New Hall Street was where I kissed a girl for the first time. We played a game called 'Postman's Knock'. What happened was that you had numbers on boys and girls, the one person who was sent out of the room would call a number and if it was yours, you went outside to be rewarded with a kiss. If you had any sense and fancied a particular girl, you would find out her number from one of your friends.

I had been going out with Mary for six months before I let the family know that I was keen on her. She had no mother, so her father lived with his two sisters. They kept a fish and chip shop in Union Street, Tipton. The two aunties were named Sarah and Caroline, but they called Sarah 'mother'. Caroline was the eldest, but she had suffered with a heart condition from birth. There was also Douglas, her younger brother, and cousin Norris.

Her 'mother' was very strict and if I was kissing Mary in the entry she would threaten to throw a bucket of cold water over us; and she would have done!

I had to tell Mum and Dad in the end about myself and Mary because Dad asked me one night where I was going. When I said I was going to Tipton he gave me a lift in the car. He asked me if I knew anyone in Union Street and I said I did. Union Street was a very rough place and that worried him, but I explained that Mary's aunties kept the local fish and chip shop. As I got out of the car, Mary came up the entry wearing the tightest jumper I had ever seen. When I pointed her out to my dad, he said that I did need to be careful!

Three months later I took Mary to the Kings Arms and introduced her to the family. There began a beautiful 51 years of married life with a person who didn't have everything good in her life, but got on with it. No man or woman could have had the life that we had together plus the sacrifices she made for my family and her own.

Sex in those days was a mysterious thing. You got lads who bragged about what they had done with a girl, but 99 times out of 100 it was only in their mind.

Mary, aged 16.

Before I go any further, a friend has just come in and seen some papers that I don't normally leave lying around. I let him read them and he said I should include the story:

This story happened when I was fifteen and in my last year at Technical College. It was January 1939 and a friend and I were on holiday. We decided to go skating on a pool. To get to the pool we had to go over pit mounds and as we approached we heard shouting and screaming. When we looked down, we saw that someone must have gone on to the ice and it had broken. My friend Ted asked what we should do, I said we'll have to go in.

As we still had a distance to go, I told him to strip off while we were running down to the edge. I was thinking that if we went in with our clothes on we would be in the same position as the drowning children. The terrible thing was that they must have been going down for the last time when we managed to get one lad to the side. While Ted tried to revive him I ran over to a pub on the main road. They must have thought I was mad because when they opened the door I stood before them in just a pair of pants in the middle of January. They called the police and Ted and I got out of the way and let them deal with it.

We said nothing to our parents at first, but we had to when reporters came to the door. We had made headline news; something that we didn't want. We got the Royal Humane Society certificate, but the most touching thing we received was a letter from one of the boy's mothers thanking Ted and myself and saying that we were not much older than their child.

My father and Mary.

When Mary and myself had been going out for about a year we decided to save in the Tipton Building Society. This would help us later on. Mary worked as a secretary to a haulage contractor and local merchant. I was still at Lee Howle’s.

At eighteen I became a Bevin Boy. You weren't allowed to oppose this so I was sent to Stoke to train as an underground mechanic. The training pit coalface was 6ft high, so it was quite easy to stand up in.

After the training I could choose which pit I wanted to work at and as my uncle and his son Harry were working in the mines at Norton Canes, Cannock, I went there. It was too far to travel from Tipton to Cannock so I decided to live at Dad's sister's, Aunt Gerty, during the week and go home at weekends. The first time I went down the conduit mine at Norton Canes I got a big shock. The coal seams at Stoke were 6ft, at Norton Canes they were 3ft, so you did a lot of kneeling down. It was a pleasure to travel home at the weekends to see Mary and sometimes to get there quicker I would not wash on Friday.

Come Friday, Mary was waiting at the Kings Arms for me to arrive by bus and Mother asked her to go up to the shop and fetch some milk. I got off the bus and just walked past her to see if she would recognise me with a black face. She walked straight past me. Mrs Onions, the shopkeeper said to her, 'it's a shame for Tony', Mary asked why, where was I, and Mrs Onions said 'he's just walked past you'.

When I started at the mine in Norton Cannes my cousin Harry, who was an overman on a coal face, took me down with him. The seam of coal he worked on was 3ft high also and all the men were on their knees.

For the first two years we took machinery down on a flat dan and these were pulled by pit ponies. There was one time I was very glad that we did. The Chief engineer told me to take a pump down to an old working. This was ten miles from the pit bottom and when going down to an old working you should by law let people on the top know you are down there. I didn't do this and that was why I appreciated the pit pony. I had just got the pump working when my miner's lamp went out. There are no telephones in old workings, so I was stuck there in darkness. Then I wondered if I sat on the dan, would the pit pony take me back to the pit bottom and his stable? As I am now writing this, he got me back!

When you are writing about your life it is surprising how many things that happened to you come back to mind. One time when I got back from the pit, Uncle Tom was sitting in the kitchen with a bucket in the middle of the table, catching the drips of water coming from the ceiling. There was trouble with the toilet upstairs. I told him that if he went up the garden and turned the stop-tap off, I would fix it, which I did.

There was only one fault with my job, when I put the plunger back in the cistern after cleaning it, I forgot the collar that holds it in place. It was quite a distance from the house to the stop-tap and I forgot to tell Tom not to turn it on full power. As the water rushed through, the plunger flew out like a bullet and landed under the bath. In three or four minutes the room was flooded. The weight of the water brought the kitchen ceiling down and it also brought a lot of bad miners' language from Uncle Tom. They never asked me to do jobs again.

Mary and I in the early days.

As I have said, Mary and I felt so confident with our feelings for one another, we started saving. We never bought an engagement ring; the money went into the Building Society. I have expressed my feelings on the sex scene and they are not what I approve of, so I will give a small example of my first steps with Mary.

We were both about seventeen years old, when one afternoon we went to a beauty spot in Baggeridge. It was a beautiful summer's day and we lay down in the grass. I started playing around on the inside of her leg, using it as a piano. I did actually play the piano and was practising my scales, so I started 'doe, ray, me, far, so, lar, tee... when I got to tee Mary said you've got so far, you may as well go to the top doe. It was much more interesting than today's sex scene.

I have mentioned that Mary was a secretary for a haulage company and they also had a coal yard. The haulage company only had two lorries, plus the coal lorry.

We went away one a year on our holiday, much against my grandmother's wishes. When I said I was going on holiday with Mary she would say 'what, at your age?'. I had to remind her that she was married at sixteen.