I met and mixed with show business people all the time I was in Blackpool. This was not particularly strange as my best friend was comedian Lennie Bennett, a fellow reporter on the Evening Gazette, who had yet to take the plunge full time into the business.
He was a Blackpool lad who knew the managers and doormen of every venue. Each season he would prowl the shows, meet the performers, make contacts. He had the right personality, was funny and also a journalist who could place stories in the evening paper and the nationals. He was popular.
Memories are many: Lennie dropped off the uncontrollable Freddie Starr at my flat so I could take him on a chaotic shopping spree; a brilliant Saturday lunchtime in the Tower Lounge bar with Lennie and veteran comic Jimmy James who had us both in tears of laughter; at a nightclub on the next table to Tommy Cooper who walked across the dance floor spilling ice cubes from the front of his trousers saying: 'An Eskimo having a pee'; and being genuinely intimidated whilst interviewing Barbara Windsor by the presence of husband gangster Ronnie Knight.
Little Jimmy Clitheroe was in his 40s when I met him. He was a radio, TV and stage star and at 4ft 3inches tall played an 11-year-old schoolboy all his career. He lived with his mother next door to Pop Wadlow, the grandfather of my wife-to-be, Maria Colaluca. Jimmy was a gentle chap.
A PR company arranged a meeting between him and Wee Georgie Wood, a star of a previous generation, at a cafe in the Winter Gardens out of season. The only people present were a couple of elderly businessmen having morning coffee, me and a photographer, and the PR people of the two stars.
Wee Georgie Wood was over 70 at the time and 4ft 9 inches tall. All he would talk about was his sex in loud and leery tones and kept asking Jimmy about getting his leg over. The only person who laughed was his PA. No one else did. The man was crass. Jimmy was a genuinely nice bloke who looked out for his elderly neighbour Pop Wadlow and was very close to his mother. He took an overdose on the day of her funeral a few years later.
I bought a brand new red Spitfire in 1967. I was getting married and thought it's now or never. It cost £715. It immediately figured in two memorable incidents.
The first was when I parked outside the office in Victoria Street, just below the Winter Gardens. A sunny day, the top down. A crowd of lady pensioners on a trip were wandering down the street. Lennie said to the ladies: 'That's Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. You should ask for his autograph.'
So they did, even though I said I wasn't.
'Stuck up sod,' one said, and then they were chasing me all the way to the office waving their handbags.
The other occasion involved Ray Martine: not a major name but he had his moments. He was a smooth Cockney Jewish comic who was also blatantly gay at a time when it wasn't legal. He hosted Stars and Garters on ITV in the 1960s and was on Jokers Wild in the 70s and was a big friend of Lennie who brought him round to my flat and we became friends. He was a brilliant comedian, did a season with Les Dawson on Central Pier and left to host his own show at The Sands nightclub. The Sands in Marton, Blackpool, not Vegas.
A few weeks before Maria and I married in 1967, he came to see me at the Gazette office. He was flamboyant as always and wore an immaculate bright green suit as we chatted on the steps. He looked like a cockatoo. Maria arrived from work, they exchanged a kiss, and we got into the open topped red Spit which was parked nearby. I started to drive down the street when Ray leapt in front of us with his arms out. A squeal of brakes, holidaymakers stopped to see what was happening and Ray flung himself on the bonnet and pleaded: 'Don't marry her. You know it's me you really love. There's still time. Our love was meant to be.' 'Piss off, Ray,' was not effective. Maria tried to slide below the dashboard. He milked the situation and, even though gay sex was still frowned upon, started getting sympathy from the crowd, who adding their own comments. Eventually he allowed us to drive away, leaving him standing sadly in the middle of the street blowing kisses. Of course, we stayed friends.

MY arrival in Blackpool was in the spring of 1964. In my wake for that summer's season came Ken Dodd, Frank Ifield, Kathy Kirby, Al Read, The Bachelors, Joe Brown, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Mike and Bernie Winters, Jimmy Tarbuck, Adam Faith and Yana and lots more I always was a trail blazer.
Reporters from the Evening Gazette were despatched to cover the opening nights of every one, from Doddy to the Ice Show at the Pleasure Beach to the Tower Circus, and write reviews. These were never derogatory. They were puff pieces that found the most positive things to say about the stars and production and entertainment value. This was Blackpool – the Vegas of the North – a town that depended on visitors and you didn't rock the boat.
My fellow journalists received their assignments to watch the shows and mingle with the stars. I waited for my turn. I got the strippers at the Royal Pavilion in Rigby Road. I didn't believe it, either.
For a few years in the 1960s, the theatre had a summer season of exotic dancing. It had been a repertory theatre but there must have been more money in young ladies taking off their clothes twice nightly. I went to early evening performance alone. I had two Press tickets but this was not a gig to which you invited a young lady.
The show was titivating in a rather sad middle aged way which totally reflected the audience: sad, male and middle aged. At the interval I went to the basement bar where the girls hung out and was surprised to see the chap who had the flat next to mine. He was a small, bald, ebullient, middle aged bank assistant and he was sitting amidst the strippers, some of whom were extremely scantily clad, having the time of his life. He apparently spent the season there.
'Denis, old boy. What are you drinking?'
After the show I drove 55 miles home to Cheshire for a late night date with a girlfriend, then back to Blackpool. My review copy was written and filed before 8 30 the next morning. The stamina of youth.
This was the same year I saw The Beatles live in Blackpool at the Opera House: you couldn't hear them for screaming girls. Coincidentally, Maria, my wife to be, was at the same gig but had seats on the front row because of her father's connections. She was just 16 and we didn't meet until New Year's Eve later that year.
The Stones also famously appeared at the Winter Gardens during my first season. This was an inspired booking as it coincided with Glasgow week, when that city's youthful warring factions came south to battle it out in surroundings with a sea breeze. The Scots began spitting at Brian Jones. Keith Richards was not impressed. He wandered to the front of the stage and kicked a youth as he tried to climb it. Riot commenced.
Kit was abandoned, the Stones were escorted out of the building over the roof, and the doors of the Winter Gardens locked. The fighting continued. Eventually the seething mass inside was subdued by two flying wedges: security staff from one side of the hall, police from the other, all with staffs drawn and swinging. They met in the middle, leaving bodies in their wake.
I reckon the Glaswegians considered they'd had a good night out.

The editor of the Evening Gazette in Blackpool had a drooping moustache that suited his personality. It was like being interviewed by a walrus. His very small office was on the first floor and looked as if it had been converted from a broom cupboard. It apparently suited him because he never left it. I worked there eight years and only once during that time was he seen in the newsroom. Perhaps he was still thinking about the war. The rumour was, he had been the only camouflage officer in the British Army to have been captured by the Italians in North Africa. Maybe they became suspicious of his igloo.
He mumbled through an interview, referred back to my application, and finally said: “You do Pitman's shorthand?”
“Yes.”
He picked up a copy of The Guardian and read that day's Leader out loud, at a fair rate of knots.
“Get all that?” he said, when he finished the whole piece.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Very good,” he said, and sounded impressed. The strange thing was he never asked me to read it back. Which was just as well as I'd been struggling after the first paragraph.
He offered me a job and I resigned from Durham (£16 a week) to move to Blackpool (£20 a week) at the start of the summer season. The town's proud boast was they had eight top class variety shows running every night. There were more stars in Blackpool than the West End. As if to prove the point, I got a first floor flat in Church Street that had previously been occupied by the tap dancing double act The Clark Brothers from Philadelphia. They had left owing a rather large bill for trans-Atlantic telephone calls.
I shared the flat with different journalists: the brilliant Al Thomas, who had a way with ladies and went onto the Sunday Mirror and then The People; was sadly re-united for a short time with the self-taught incompetent from Durham who also trekked to the West Coast; and Ted Turner, one of a line of very tall chums I seem to have attracted throughout life.
As if being at the seaside, in a resort packed with show business stars wasn't enough, the chap who became my best pal at the office was a very good reporter called Mike Berry who really wanted to be a comedian. He was just starting out and gigging in clubs around the North West. His stage name was Lennie Bennett and I became his roadie, which entailed driving him to and from venues and carrying his stage suit to the dressing room. Lennie eventually became a major star but at that time he was juggling two demanding jobs.
It was a full life at a very vibrant newspaper that was still family owned and lorded over by the patriarchal editor-in-chief Sir Harold Grime who arrived in chauffeur driven Rolls Royce every morning. Ah, those were the days.
This was proper journalism with three editions a day and four on Saturday including a sporting pink. The area stretched inland over the Fylde countryside and along the coast from Lytham to Fleetwood with four district offices. There was always something happening in a town that pulsed with showbiz stars and holidaymakers eager for a good time during the summer, and crime and conferences and the ever present promise of drama at sea during the winter.
The 60s were beginning to swing and the Gazette was possibly, to echo the Heineken advert, the best newspaper experience at that time for any young journalist anywhere. The office was full of characters and I loved my eight years there.
When it was time to leave, to travel abroad with a wife and young baby, I asked Sir Harold for a reference. He provided one on parchment which was glowing and signed with a flourish and impressive enough to keep me out of an Albanian jail. I also called in the broom cupboard to see the editor.
'I'm leaving next week. Could I possible have a reference?'
'What? Oh yes. Of course. What's your name?'

I landed back in Manchester from Uganda in 1963 carrying two cuckoo clocks and two African drums and with an engagement ring sewn into the lining of my trouser pocket. My Auntie Doris was most confused when I gave her a cuckoo clock.

“Where have you been?” she said.

The clocks had been acquired because London was fog bound and we were diverted to Geneva for a two hour stop-over. I blame the impulse purchase on jet lag and being stupid.

The ring was for Margaret, who had been my long term girlfriend. We met young, others in our crowd got married but we both had our eyes on career. She had ended our relationship before I went to Africa but we had written. I returned with the ring and she foolishly accepted my proposal. Unfortunately, our engagement ended within a year. She went to work in Paris and I ended up, eventually, in Blackpool. What a coincidence, I thought. They've both got towers.

Margaret was a linguist (French, Spanish, German) went on to travel the world as a flight attendant for British Airways, live in Australia and make her home for many years in Germany. We met again five years ago and exchange the occasional email and remain friends.

I arrived back in the UK shortly after the Evening Chronicle closed putting 70 journalists out of work. This was not good timing as my first priority was getting a job. Journalism in those days was a small profession, and is even smaller now, but there were always jobs if you were prepared to move. I ended up in Durham for a year. A beautiful city, friendly people and Newcastle Brown. The office was located close to the castle and Cathedral with a pub next door. Mind you, it took a while to understand the accent. The landlord of the pub served during the war on a Canadian ship whose crew believed he was Norwegian for the entirety of hostilities. Why aye, man. It was good fun. Durham was a university city of great pubs and the nightclubs of Newcastle were just up the road.

I shared a terraced house with another reporter, who shall remain nameless, who was best described by one sub-editor as a "self taught incompetent". He returned from a night drinking and fell asleep with his head in the living room fire. Fortunately, the flames had gone out but the coals were hot. He singed off an eybrow, eyelashes and a large chunk of hair. It gave him a lopsided startled look which did him no favours when trying to interview anyone face to face.

I worked from the head office of the Durham Advertiser, was also for a time district man for the Northern Echo and subbed on the Evening Despatch.

I attended the Christmas carol service at Durham Gaol. This was and is high security and close to the city centre. The night I went with a photographer it snowed. The scene was Dickensian – until we got inside. We were put in the upper choir stalls of the prison chapel where, a warder told us, we would be safe from the hardened male criminals below. He said nothing about the hardened female criminals who were then ushered in to share the benches of our haven. The photographer was a mature chap with a bald head and a paunch; I was 23, slim, reasonably good looking and nervous. The eyes of the ladies fixed on me as if I were on the menu. I needed a pint or three when we got out.

During my time in the North, I dated two or three young ladies, like you do, before acquiring a serious girlfriend. Unfortunately she had a choice between me and a chap on the nationals. Can't understand why she chose him.

It was time to move on. Blackpool beckoned.

You can never sleep properly on an aeroplane, even when there are plenty of vacant seats, and I awoke from a patchy slumber in a somewhat disorientated state. I lifted the shade and saw we were flying over what appeared to be the biggest builder's yard in the world. This was dawn over the Sahara. There were gulleys and debris; this was nothing like Beau Geste.
I had enjoyed four and a half years at the Knutsford Guardian but knew it was time to move on. A career and life beckoned. Should I try an evening newspaper or the nationals that had offices in Manchester? None appealed. Especially as I got a job offer from Africa.
Caz, who had been a reporter at the County Express office in Knutsford, was already there, working as a sub-editor on the Uganda Nation. He sent me an airmail letter saying there was a vacancy. I sent a job application by return and the editor replied within 10 days offering me a position as a sub at 400 East African Shillings a week, which was equivalent to £20. I accepted, gave my notice, and reported to a medical officer in Manchester for jabs that included yellow fever.
Within three weeks of applying, I was on a BOAC flight from Gatwick to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. I awoke to view a disappointing Sahara beneath me and reflected for the first time that I had been hired as a sub. Thing was, I hadn't the first idea about subbing. I worried for all of two minutes. You're like that at 21.
We came in over Lake Victoria to land at Entebbe, a place I had never heard of until I got my plane ticket. This was decades before the internet. You looked places up in encyploedias and the Times Atlas in the early 1960s.
The heat hit me as I got off. Then the chaos of the arrivals hall which was a large shed furnished with collapsible tables. I got my luggage and started arguing with an immigration officer who was disinclined to let me into the country. Behind him I saw Caz, waving from behind a barrier. I pointed Caz out and the immigration chap invited him forward. Caz gave him 40 shillings and the chap gave me an entry visa and a temporary work permit. Easy what 40 shillings could buy.
As I was arriving, Jomo Kenyatta was leaving. I don't think it was anything personal. We had passed on the tarmac. Jomo waved his fly whisk in my direction before boarding a private plane for the hop to Nairobi. Because of his visit, both daily newspapers had sent journalists to cover his departure. Caz took me straight to the roof top bar to meet them and introduce me to Tusker beer. I liked both the journalists and the beer.
The drive to Kampala took about an hour along a road that was narrow but was at least tarmac. Many of the roads, I was to discover, were murram – basically dirt that became mud when it rained. This road went through bush and villages and motorists drove it as fast as their vehicles would allow with only a passing acknowledgement of statutary regulations. As we hurtled along I was given the golden rule of East African driving: “If you hit anyone or anything don't stop until you get to a police station.” Most of the locals had machetes and might use them.
What most impressed me during the ride were the colours. It was as if Van Gough had been let loose with a huge brush. They overwhelmed the senses and I recall that in my first letter home I quoted Winston Churchill who named Uganda the Pearl of Africa and decscribed it as a “beautiful garden with an exuberance of vegetation”.
We drove through the city to the Silver Springs Hotel, an old colonial building that housed reception, dining rooms and bar, and a veranda upon which was served afternoon tea at four o'clock. Guests were housed in bungalows set amidst palm trees. It also had a swimming pool with its own bar and games rooms. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.
My room, plus all meals, cost 100 shillings a week (that's £5). Which left me £15 a week to spend on booze and having a good time. My wage at home, had been about a fiver. I really did think I'd died and gone to heaven.
My first few hours had been a mad and brilliant experience. Surely, it couldn't get any better than this (and stop calling me Shirley). Actually, it did. Much better.

REX Brindle was proud of his big American car. It was the only one of its kind in Uganda. So he was devastated when he got up one morning and found the car was jacked up on bricks and his wheels were gone. He thought they would be impossible to replace and went to a garage in Kampala. Yes, they said, they could replace them, but it would take a week. A week later, they fitted his stolen wheels back on without a blush and charged him an exhorbitant price.
Life was always amusing, different, exciting and bizarre in East Africa in the 1960s. I lived in The Silver Springs Hotel with mainly other ex-pats. It also served as a base for US air crew for a month when the UN were flying mercy missions into the Congo during the civil war. My newspaper, the Daily Nation, was offered a couple of seats to fly into Stanleyville (now Kisangani) to do a cover piece. I lost the toss and my chum Caz went with a photographer. The plane landed and let them off into a town besieged by the Simbas and took off again. It was the last plane out and Caz and the photoghrapher were stranded there for three weeks until they escaped overland and flew home from South Africa. All things considered, I'm glad I lost the toss.
I was night editor: the paper was basically done and I was there in case of emergencies and to do early pages for the next day. It didn't stop me frequenting the bars of the city, that ranged from the ultra colonial City Bar to the White Nile Club in Mengo which provided brilliant live African music. My friends included a local CIA rep, a Kikuyu printer called Winston and a bevy of characters that would not be out of place in a Graham Greene novel. I toured Murchison Falls Game Park with a couple of mates, and Nairobi Game Park in the company of a retired park warden and, as a photographer, covered the East African Rally and an international football match between Uganda and Ethiopia, who were current African champions. Ethiopia won 7-1 and four of their team took their boots off at half time and played in their bare feet.
There were only 6,000 Europeans (mainly British) in Uganda and, to a degree, racial rules still applied. We produced both English language and local language newspapers and the staff mixed freely. But that's journalists. They were a good bunch.
Africa was a wonderful experience. I even had a bank account with the Ottoman Bank and I still have a cheque book. Unfortunately, when I arrived I entered on a temporary work permit and the newly independent country was flexing its muscles against the colonial presence. I was issued with a deportation notice well before my two year contract ended and given two days to leave.
Even my departure was memorable. A dozen of my chums from the Silver Springs Hotel went with me to the airport, white, Asian and black, in a convoy of cars. I wandered out onto the runway, one of only a handful of passengers being picked up by a flight from South Africa, and the balcony behind me erupted into cheers and shouts and rude comments from them, all outlined against the night sky as they waved drinks in a farewell toast. I still don't know if I was popular or they were just glad to see me go.

Whilst working in Knutsford I got into the habit of answering the telephone by saying: 'Knutsford Guardian'. That was until the vicar of Knutsford, who had a deep sonorous voice and a sense of humour, replied: “Tell me, dear boy, just what it is that you are guarding?'
After that, I always added my name, which is correct journalistic practice.
I thoroughly enjoyed my four years in this handsome and historic town of narrow streets, quaint shops and many pubs. Opposite the office was the Angel on one corner and the White Lion on the other. At the top of the street opposite was the Lord Eldon, further down King Street were the Cross Keys, Rose and Crown and the Royal George, and, up a ginnel, the Freemasons. Not all have survived the gentrification of the town that has happened over the last 55 years. The Guardian office is now an antique shop.
Among local celebrities I met was journalist and broadcaster Brian Redhead, who lived in a rather nice Georgian house on Gaskell Avenue – named after the author Mrs Gaskell – that was opposite the Heath, the open space where the May Day celebrations were held each year. I had heard rumours he might be turning thespian as he had been seen returning home from the television studios in Manchester still wearing make-up, so it was with trepidation I rang his bell one morning to ask for an interview for a story about the state of the Heath.
I was admitted, shown to his upstairs study and served tea and chocolate biscuits by his extremely attractive wife, so that my hands were full and notebook was redundant.
'Tell you what,' he said. 'It might be quicker if I type a statement for you.'
And he did.
Five or six succinct paragraphs below an intro I happily pinched as my own. A great journalist and a charming bloke.
I was shown round the Jodrell Bank Observatory (in nearby Goostrey) by Sir Bernard Lovell. This was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world at the time and Sir Bernard was definitely a Very Important Person, but another great gentleman who, rather than science, wanted to talk about cricket, for which he had a passion. He played for his local village team.
The third chap, who will always remain in my mind, was Knutsford MP Sir Walter Bromley Davenport. He was a larger than life character, who had been in the Grenadier Guards in the 1920s. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he raised and commanded the 5th Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment.
I have been a life-long socialist and my politics were defined even then, but I liked the man and I met him several times during the 1959 election campaign. He showed me round his family home of Capesthorne Hall, a stately home big enough to have its own chapel, and served me a beer. This was a one-to-one visit between the sitting MP and local reporter (aged 18 and a half). He won me over without pretension or condescension. He had genuine charisma and also a loud voice.
The stories about him were legend. On a crowded train at Crewe he walked up and down shouting 'All change'. When people moved, he chose a vacant seat.
He was a junior whip for the Conservative Party and kept fellow members in order. When he spied a chap making a surreptitious escape before a crucial late night vote in the House of Commons, he kicked him down a flight of stairs. Unfortunately, the man was not a Tory MP but the Belgian Ambassador.
They don't make MPs like that, any more.

My parents wanted me to be a printer. My father was a stereotype operator at the Daily Express in Manchester and earned exceptional money because the print unions were so strong. He got me an interview at the Manchester Evening News for an apprenticeship. About two dozen lads turned up for morning interviews and aptitude tests and half a dozen of us were invited back in the afternoon.
The job went to the son of another member of the union but I was told the next apprenticeship was mine. That's the way it operated.
I was fortunate to get myself a job in journalism at The Knutsford Guardian before the next apprenticeship became available. This was 1958 and I was taken on a six month trial as a junior reporter on £2 17s 6d a week. A print apprenticeship, I seem to recall, paid around £7 a week. My parents were less than overwhelmed.
The manager/editor at the Guardian was Maurice Carver. The vacancy had arisen because the senior reporter had moved to the Manchester Evening News. Dave Skentelberry (Skent) had become senior in his stead, and I was the new junior.
Knutsford was, and still is, a lovely and wealthy Cheshire town. Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell had been a resident in the 19th century and used it as the setting for her novel Cranford. In the late 1950s it still seemed surprised that someone had built a council estate on the other side of the Moor. Mr Carver (never Maurice) looked like Eric Morecambe and, although he was only in his thirties, behaved with a gravitas beyond his years. Or maybe he thought that was how editors should behave. He had served in British Intelligence and been in Berlin as the war ended. He told entertaining stories of Russian barbarity and stupidity.
The weekly newspaper followed a gentl routine that started slowly on Thursday, publication day, and got gradually busier as we closed in on the Wednesday noon deadline. I covered everything from funerals to police calls, golden weddings to Quarter Sessions, garden fetes to the Royal May Day festivities that unfortunately coincided with the Cup Final (first Saturday in May, back then) and, when Skent eventually moved to the Lancashire Evening Post and I became senior, I followed the Mid Cheshire League fortunes of Knutsford FC and had two junior beneath me: Malcolm and Robin.
The typewriters were massive sit-up and beg machines built like battleships that could amputate the fingers of the unwary. The County Express also had an office in town manned by local lad Dave 'Caz' Carsberg. Caz and I always went to the Cranford Cafe every morning for coffee at 10 30 after police calls. I spent a delightful four and a half years in an idyllic setting, completed a three year apprenticeship and learnt the rudiments of the job.
It was a damn fine better way to earn a living in what was the golden age of journalism than as a printer in Manchester.

I was mad about soccer from an early age. Every day I went past Old Trafford on the way to De La Salle College. Unfortunately, De La Salle was a rugby school.

The first time I played rugby I was given a right bollocking. I was always quick and was placed in the backs and, as the ball came out and was passed to me, I immediately ducked, weaved and ran sideways to avoid the huge sods on the other side who wanted to rip my head off.

“No,” screamed the teacher. “Run straight!”

This seemed to defy logic, common sense and self preservation but this was the rule: run straight and pass the ball before being hit. I learnt to pass the ball very quickly indeed.

For a time, I fancied myself as a scrum half until I encountered a lad from Rochdale playing the same position for the opposition who was a similar height to me but was as wide as a beer barrel and had honed his skills at rugby league. As he scooped the ball, I tried to grab him and got a forearm smash rather than a hand off. Amazing: I kept my teeth.

The De La Salle brothers took the game seriously even when one form played another. As I ran from the dressing room, I exchanged words with a lad on the other team (with whom I would later catch a train home) and was given a bollocking for talking to the opposition. This was not judged to be conducive to committing the necessary grievous bodily harm on the field of play.

When I first arrived at the school, I went straight into the second form and was three weeks late for the new term although my name had become known and I had acquired the nickname Killer. Then I turned up. Yorkshire accent, small and a body like a Twiglet.

In the third form I encountered bullying which is why I acquired two large mates who both played prop. I tried to stop the bullying by challenging the major culprit to a boxing match in the gym after school. I must have read too many Greyfriar School books. He was taken aback by my suggestion, as was as I, at having made it. But as it had been made before witnesses neither of us could back down. Flash Harry, the PE teacher, was all in favour of blood sports and agreed to stage it and before long, the whole school knew. It was a kind of fame, for a short while, although I was not looking forward to the actual contest. I'd never boxed in my life.

At the last minute, the head heard and cancelled it. I was extremely relieved but the bully boy made one last taunt in the cloakroom after school.

My two prop mates hung him on a hook by the back of his coat in such a way he couldn't free himself. It was, apparently, a long time before the janitor finally got him down. But the bullying stopped.

This aid came at a price. My two mates decided I was just the right size to play hooker. They showed me how and I got used to hanging from their shoulders and swinging like Cheetah. It was fun in practice; it was murder actually playing in a match. The opposition hookers were not only adept at swinging their feet, they could also swing their fists. I never know how they managed to get one free; I never could.

I made good friends at school. The best was Dave, who lived close by, and Tony Curtis (no relation to the film star). Dave was the rebel of any pack. He was a tall well built lad with the walk of Robert Mitchum and the voice of Elvis Presley. He often skipped school. I only did so occasionally and always under the influence of Dave. A particular occasion was when we were in the fourth form and went to a Manchester matinee screening of Brigitte Bardot in the X rated film And God Created Woman. I wore a plain navy blue blazer that he loaned me as a disguise. It was long enough to be an overcoat. He bought the tickets while I hid behind Tony and we went up to the deserted circle.

After the shorts, the lights came up and when we looked down into the stalls, half the fourth and fifth forms were there, still in school blazers.

A memorable afternoon during which I discovered that playing football and supporting Manchester United might not be as totally fulfilling for a growing youth as once had seemed. I discovered sex and fell in love for the first time … with Ms Bardot.