school from my pre-pubescent years onwards.The title above refers to the beginning of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which was my favorite tv show in the early 70's. It was completely bonkers, and so different to any other comedy around at that time. Dad already had a zany sense of humour, no doubt helped along by heavy doses of 'The Goon Show' on the radio, so it seemed a natural progression. There are far too many sketches to even begin to list, but here's one that shows what utter nonsense it was, and perhaps why it appealed to me, who at that time chuckled at anything, and I think would've laughed even if my arse was on fire!
Mrs. Conclusion: Hullo, Mrs. Premise.
Mrs. Premise: Hullo, Mrs. Conclusion.
Conclusion: Busy Day?
Premise: Busy? I just spent four hours burying the cat.
Conclusion: Four hours to bury a cat?
Premise: Yes - it wouldn't keep still, wriggling about howling its head off.
Conclusion: Oh - it wasn't dead, then?
Premise: No, no - but it's not at all well, so as we were going away for a fortnight's holiday, I thought I'd better bury it just to be on the safe side. Conclusion: Quite right - you don't want to come back from Sorrento to a dead cat. It'd be so anticlimactic. Yes, kill it now, that's what I say. We're going to have to have our budgie put down.
Premise: Really - is it very old?
Conclusion: No, we just don't like it. We're going to take it to the vet tomorrow.
Premise: Tell me, how do they put budgies down, then?
Conclusion: Well, it's funny you should ask that, because I've just been reading a great big book about how to put your budgie down, and apparently you can either hit them with the book, or you can shoot them just there, just above the beak.
Premise: Just there? Well, well, well. 'Course, Mrs Essence flushed hers down the loo.
Conclusion: Ooh no, you shouldn't do that - no, that's dangerous! They breed in the sewers , and eventually you get evil-smelling flocks of huge soiled budgies flying out of people's lavatories infringing their personal freedom.
...........................
My life felt very different once I'd started at the Grammar School, and I'm sure by the age of 12, I felt I was an adult already. I was left to my own devices much of the time, and I have to say that not all of my decisions were good ones. The worst decision I ever made was when I decided to start smoking. I had met a local lad one day while I was strolling along the riverbank opposite our house. His name was Ron Skinner, and he was a year older than me. He lived on Willoughby Road with his father who was a chef at the Pilgrim Hospital. Ron and I seemed to hit it off, and we became friends for a time. He was
already smoking Consulate cigarettes, and asked me if I'd like to try one. I suppose thinking back I must have thought it was a grown-up thing to do, and quite daring, so at the age of 12, I started. Ron used to thieve cigarettes from packs left around the house by his father, but because Ron was now providing me with smokes too, his Dad soon cottoned on, and gave Ron a good hiding. Of course, we were already hooked, so needed to get the dreaded weed some other way. Ever resourceful, Ron hit on a plan. His grandfather ran an allotment on Horncastle Road, growing prize carnations. One day with Ron, we went along the rows of flowers, picking every fourth or fifth bloom in the hope that his grandad wouldn't notice. Armed with baskets of carnations, we made our way door to door down Horncastle Road, asking if people would be interested in buying our flowers at only 10p a bunch. We 
lied that the proceeds were going to a Children's Home. We didn't tell them that we were the children whose homes the proceeds would be going to! After selling our booty, we had enough to go to the Ropers' Arms off-licence and buy enough Consulates to keep us going for weeks. They cost 14p for 10 at that time, and as we were only smoking around 5 a day, we were very pleased with ourselves.
I was lucky that I wasn't around when Ron's grandad realised who had stolen his prize blooms. He told Ron's dad, and Ron got another good hiding.
Around the same time, Ron introduced me to a schoolfriend of his from Kitwood Boys' School called Graham.
Graham lived in Grand Sluice Lane directly opposite our back garden gate, but I'd never actually seen him before. They had only recently moved to the house from the country after his father had died prematurely of Weils disease, which is carried in rats urine and infects the human body with leptospirosis bacteria. Graham's dad had worked in a grainstore at a farm, and that's no doubt how he contracted the disease. His Mum moved into town to make life easier for her family, of which Graham was the youngest. Like Ron, he was a year older than me, but we soon became firm friends. He had a little dog called Lucky, and every time Graham walked Lucky, he would call for me too. We went for long walks and discussed every kind of topic we could think of, both of us trying to make sense of the world we were living in. One of the topics that springs to mind at 12 and 13 is what's springing to life down below, often of its own accord and with little 
control. We talked about how good it felt getting hard, and that progressed on to making each other hard. We invented forfeits and silly games and spent some time play-fighting with the express intention of getting hard. It was simply a young teenage voyage of discovery, we didn't reach orgasm with each other and we were never 'lovers' in the strict sense of the word, but we were very close as friends. I still smile to myself when I remember Graham saying to me when he was 15 and I was 14, "I think we ought to stop our games. I think it may be bordering on homosexuality". I was shocked to hear the word, even though I wasn't too sure what it meant. The games ceased, and we remained friends until a year later when he left Boston to train as a Police Officer in Lincoln. He still used to call when he came home, but it was never quite the same. 
He passed his driving test and bought himself an Austin 1100, and we went to one or two obscure village hall dances in it, but I can't say I ever enjoyed them much. At one such dance, he met a nurse called Lynn, and they started 'courting' regularly. When they eventually married, I was his Best Man. They moved to Horncastle with his first posting and we saw less and less of each other.
While Graham and I were becoming best friends, Barbara found a new best friend of her own at the local Mayfair. His name was Peter, and he hailed from Pinchbeck, a village about 14 miles out of town.
They dated for some time, and became lovers. He started to stay overnight some weekends, and would drive over 
to see her most evenings in the week. He was a butcher at the time, but as a hobby he liked Grass Track Racing. He had a couple of different cars, and as I was often at a loose end, I would sometimes go with them to meets. His twin brothers, Martin and David would often go along too, and I remember finding David 
incredibly attractive, with his cute face and shock of blonde hair. I never let on, of course, and just used to admire him from afar. I suppose alarm bells should have sounded in my head, but I didn't worry about it at that time. I was so naive that I didn't even know what being homosexual, or gay meant. I suppose I just assumed that it was a natural part of growing up. It was certainly natural for me, anyway.
To backtrack a little, when I was 12, I started a paper round with Berry's newsagents on 12/6d a week. That is to say, 12 shillings and sixpence. Decimalisation didn't come in until 15th February 1971.
Until that time, we were still using Roman style money, hence the 'd' for dinare meaning pence. On the day that the new coinage was introduced, Ian Ainsworth and I rushed to Woolworth's in our school dinner break just to buy some sweets and check out the new, strange currency. Everyone was issued with a pocket card converter, and all shops carried charts such as this:
If you wanted to convert the new money electronically, the first calculators were making an appearance at this time. Considering that the average wage in 1971 was around £15 a week, I wonder how many people actually bought these machines, priced at £192 for a basic model and £250 if you wanted it to do percentages! 
Back to the paper round. The law had been changed that year to protect minors at work, and you had to have an Employment card which stated that you were 13 years old before you could do any sort of part-time work. I promised Mr Berry for months that I would bring in my card, but just kept 'forgetting'. I did eventually get a card, but not till I'd been there for months. Not long after I'd started, we went 
on strike! A boy called Clive Atkinson, whose Dad was a Union man on the Docks, told Mr Berry that we were being paid 5 shillings less than WH Smith were paying, so unless he upped our pay, we were refusing to take out the local weekly paper, the Lincolnshire Standard. After a stalemate of about an hour, Mr Berry gave in and from that week put up our wages to 15 shillings. Power to the little guy! I kept my paper round right up until I left school four years later. As 'overtime', when I was 15 I remember I used to do a Sunday round for 8 shillings/40p, when I only received £1.00 for all the other six days.
When I was 15, Dave Rimmer and I both took part-time jobs as delivery boys with Melias Grocery store in Dolphin Lane. For delivering boxes of groceries on a carrier bike three nights after school, and all day Saturday, we received the incredible sum of £1.62p! Well, it helped subsidise my smoking habit :(
Whilst working there, I took out my first girlfriend. Josie was her name, and she worked in the shop. I
think actually it was her that asked me out. She was already 16, and seemed very worldly-wise and educated sexually, having already dated a married man from her village. I don't know why I went out with her, because she did nothing for me, but I think I must have thought it was about time I started the mating game. We kissed and cuddled and groped each other a lot, but I never had sex with her. The hollow between her breasts seemed to be constantly sweaty, and I'm sure I used to cringe inwardly when I was supposedly enjoying the petting. One night after fiddling with her in the back row of the cinema, she had an orgasm over my hand. The smell was horrendous, and I felt like throwing up, but managed to hide my feelings from her. I know I couldn't wait to get home and scrub my hands! Let's just say the affair was short-lived.
Life at home continued on. Mum and Dad were both still working, and no doubt struggling to make ends meet, with bills to pay and six hungry mouths to feed.
Weekends away in the van happened a little less frequently, as the family were all growing up fast, but we still had occasional trips to Ingoldmells or Seacroft, as much for Paul's sake as anything. 
We did have a couple of times when we went in to Butlin's at Skegness for the day, and that was always fun, because they had lots of amusements and a monorail..woo. 
Barbara was dating Pete seriously and he stayed overnight in Boston quite a few times, which I don't think Dad was too happy about, but didn't say much. Paul and Carol were growing up fast, and Auntie and Uncle next door were as 
supportive as ever. As kids we often used to get home to find Auntie Gertie fetching veg in from the garden or in the kitchen peeling spuds for dinner.
In the summer holidays, instead of wasting the whole six or seven weeks, most kids would seek out work on the land. Some farmers would put out hand-written signs on the roadside, or word would get around that this or that farm needed workers, so we would head off on
our bikes with a box of sandwiches and a bottle of squash (diluted orange juice), and try to get rich. Being mostly arable land around Boston, there were various jobs depending on the crop that needed harvesting. Bean and Pea Pulling was always popular, and after 
stripping the vines of pods, you had to fill a sack, take it to the supervisor, who would then weigh it to make sure it was heavy enough, and then you would get your shilling, or whatever they were paying. I remember as a younger kid going with Mum on a bus to Frithville every day, where we worked in a farm shed 'bulb cleaning'. This just meant that you worked at a bench, stripping flower bulbs of excess outer skins, roots and dirt with your hands, and filling a bucket at a time. When you had a full bucket, you took it to be weighed, and they would mark your total 
down in a book. Again, it was 'piece work' so you were only paid on what work you brought in. I don't remember how many buckets I filled in a week, but I do remember that I earned £1 16s 6d on my last week there, so I wasn't going to retire as a child millionaire anytime soon. Farm work continued in the holidays right up until my last school year, where I went to work for Grant's farm fulltime for about 8 pounds a week. The work that summer was mainly flower pulling, 'brussell-ing', and bulb-cleaning again. I suppose I was lucky in a way that I was being paid a wage, albeit small, because I know that I 
stood no chance of making much money in the flower fields. Some of the 'ladies' that worked the land on a regular basis were built like tanks, and just seemed to work like powerhouses all day. You had to straddle the flower rows, pull and tie 10 into a bunch with an elastic band, and leave your bunches in your row until you had enough to fill a box with about 50 bunches. Those on 'piecework' were then paid by the box. It was damned hard work, and it made me determined that I didn't want to make my livelihood on the land. Luckily for me, the last couple of weeks were spent indoors boxing up the cut flowers, which was much easier. 
I don't know if things have altered now, but at that time, lots of the permanent farmworkers lived in 'tied' cottages, which meant that if they wanted to leave their job, they had to give up their homes too because they were the property farm owner. Because the work was so badly paid that they had little choice but to stay where they were, usually with both husband and wife and sometimes their kids, all working for the same farmer.
By the 1970's Grandad Clay and Nanna Nellie were living just three houses away from
us at number 47, and Grandad used to come round every Saturday morning for a chat, and to put the world to rights. I was always interested in what he could tell me about his younger days, but he was sometimes a difficult man to talk to because he could be quite abrupt. I remember asking him about his Japanese POW days, but he was very reticent to say very much. I did learn that when he was first captured, he was led with about a hundred others into a field surrounded by
barbed wire. From there they had to build their own fences to keep them in, and their own huts to sleep in. The Japs had 4 machine-guns trained on them the whole time they worked. The food was so bad that he lost almost 4 stones (56lb) in weight. When I asked if he had ever killed anyone in the war, his 
response was, "Of course I did, you silly bugger! If I hadn't killed them, they'd have killed me!" Being a young teen, it makes you sit up and take notice when you realise your nearest and dearest have actually taken lives, but that's the nature of war, I guess. I am thankful that I have never had to go through National Service or suffer the misery of being 'called up' as cannon fodder on some foreign shores.
Evenings at home centred around the television mostly, but I had bought myself a mono cassette recorder, and used to like recording my own music cassettes from the radio. Mum used to knit and crochet sometimes, and Dad used to like playing the organ in the front room.
About once a week we used to get a visit from Dennis, a family friend that Dad had first met when he was delivering groceries. Dennis was a funny guy, and he and Dad would love to mess with anything musical, or make jokes about anything and everything until they would be in fits of laughter. Dennis was one of the first people ever to buy a Moog synthesiser, and we would all laugh hysterically at some of the silly, farty noises it could produce at the same time as he was playing music.
Because of Dad and Dennis's interest in music, Paul also got hit by the
bug when Dad bought him a Stylophone. This was more of a toy than a proper instrument, but produced electronic music by tapping or dragging a stylus across its mini keyboard.
From knocking out a tune or two on there, Paul progressed on to the organ, and with coaching by Dennis and encouragement from Dad, he
eventually became quite an accomplished player. Paul learnt to read music, and picked it up quite quickly, but Dad preferred to 'play by ear' initially. He too managed to get to grips with sheet music in time, so it was always quite a musical household. If Dad wasn't playing then 
Paul was, so we were either treated to suchlike as the strains of 'Moon River' or 'Star Wars theme', depending on who was playing! Dad's record collection reflected their interest with LP's by some of the best organists around at the time. One of his favourites was Klaus Wunderlich, and here's Klaus playing 'Tico Tico' on an organ similar to his, the Wersi...
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