The Naming of Cars

BESSIE

Have you ever wondered why people name their cars and why eight times out of ten they chose a female name?

I have recently had a lot of trouble with my pride and joy, a 1984 Nissan 1400cc bakkie, known to me as Bessie. She was recently in hospital for almost a month, with mechanics and auto-electricians unable to diagnose the problem.

A simple problem, I thought, poor old Bessie kept on cutting out on my visits to the local shops and the waste collection yard, mere four or five-kilometre journeys.

The engine simply stopped firing. My grey matter has never retained any of the fundamentals regarding automobile engines, but my household electrical expertise told me the problem centred around either a lack of fuel or an electrical short.

The hired auto electricians I delivered her to firstly replaced all the leads to and from the distributor, that is the cables to the plugs and the cable to a newly installed starter-coil. I collected the bakkie after a day, but the following morning Bessie again refused to start. After three or four attempts I managed to get her out of the driveway onto the street and cruise her up and down the road but on the fourth test run she conked out.

I phoned Keith at Stallone-Auto-Electrical and told him of my problem. He sent over a driver with a technician and they succeeded in getting Bessie back to their workshop.

Two days later Keith phoned me saying they’d sorted out the problem and cleaned out and checked the fuel pump and replaced the fuel filter so, I picked up Bessie and drove her home without a problem.

She was then inactive for seven das as my son took me to Mountain Sanctuary Park in the Magalisberg mountains as written about in my previous blog.

On my return to Egoli, the city of gold Johannesburg, I attempted to start Bessie.

No luck.

The starter turned over, but no spark was reaching the plugs, another phone call and Bessie was hospitalised a third time.

Two days later Tony, one of the owners of Stallone, drove Bessie to my abode and collected me to return to their workshop and settle my account.

Account settled, and I was now informed that they had given me a new battery, a new carburettor, a new reconditioned-starter and checked all the wiring, so Bessie was fit to run her menial tasks like local shopping and waste removal. I drove her home.

The following day after a visit to the refuse-collection yard I decided that a celebratory drink was needed so, I proceeded to the nearby local bottle store to purchase a bottle of vodka.

On the drive home Bessie cut out again, luckily before I reached the main road, Jan Smuts Avenue, which was now packed with rush-hour traffic.

Thank God for modern technology, which usually I hate, my cell phone sprang into action and after a half hour wait Tony and technician arrived. Tony drove me home while his technician managed to start up Bessie and return her to the workshop for the fourth time.

Clutching my bottle of Vodka, I sat down, switched on the tele to watch some rugby highlights and poured myself a triple shot to calm my frayed nerves. Three stiff drinks later I began to cogitate over the opening question, why do we name vehicles with female names?

One theory is that the habit carried over from men’s habit of naming ships after women, usually a Goddess’s name from ancient times. This reason combined with the chauvinistic idea that a female car was just a pile of metal and would not work without a man at the wheel! Men adopted the mentality that their automobiles must be tended and coddled with a gentle hand, thus perceiving them as female.

A recent survey shows that the most common car names are, Betsy, Bessie, Sally, Bertha, Lucy and Sally. Other names from modern TV programmes and movies have now entered the list with the additions being, The Enterprise, Optimus Prime, Millennium Falcon, and The Batmobile.

An ageing mechanic I knew in my childhood gave me the best reason we call them female names.

He said in a thick Lancastrian accent, “Cars? Ya call ‘em women’s names, right? Them’s just fucking trouble! Like ya Missus or the piece ont’ side!”

My Bessie had certainly not given me trouble during my twenty-six years of ownership. She had one previous owner when I purchased her in 1990. Her engine has now been round-the-clock four times and I’ve had her re-bored twice, taking her on long distance drives to Cape Town and St Francis Bay near Port Elizabeth. Both these journeys are both well over a thousand kilometres and can take fourteen hours of steady driving. She completed these tasks without failing and I must have made the trip to Durban on the East coast at least five times.

The next day.

It was a Friday and I knew that I had to visit the refuse dump with a three-week load of garden debris, Keith phoned me and said Tony would be round in twenty minutes with Bessie. This time she had been fitted with a brand-new distributor for which I had to cough up another one thousand Rand. I climbed in to drive her and Tony back to the Stallone workshop. I settled my outstanding account and did not wish them “Au revoir.”

Just a blunt English, “Goodbye!”

I was praying I would not have to return.

It is now three days later and so far, Bessie has made four shopping trips, one refuse dump visit, and carried some cut-down garden stakes to a friend who lives about five kilometres away.

I have now decided to re-christen Bessie and name her not after a female, as is the fashion, but in honour of her hospitalisation, she will be called: RE-Furbished!

If she makes another trip to my garden-stake friend this coming Tuesday morning, to collect a disused electric dishwasher, then that will be her name until I depart this mortal realm.

SILENCE

 “Silence is true wisdom’s best reply.” Euripides.

And as Shakespeare says, “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share, and no one dare disturb the sound of silence.” 

Silence is a beautiful and majestic essence to absorb, particularly the silence of nature.

I have just returned from five days in the beauty and tranquillity of Mountain Sanctuary Park high on the Northern slopes of the Magaliesberg mountains.

It was there that I spent every day absorbing the silence of nature.

It’s difficult to explain how the silence of nature differs from the enforced silence of an examination room or hall. They will both register close to zero on any decibel-gauge-meter that tracks the scratching of pens on paper or the distant call of a bird in flight, but the difference is, I found, surreal and spiritual.

I arose every morning at day break around five fifteen.

After a visit to the toilet and the making of a mug of tea I wandered out of our cosy camping abode and sat on a plastic chair next to a table where we had eaten our braaied meal the previous evening.

The silence engulfed me, it seemed to wrap itself like a light weight duvet around my whole being. For a second life froze and then the calls of nature exploded in my ear drums, bird calls, the buzz of early morning insects, and the rattle of the Vervet monkeys on our tin roof. The latter were on their daily search for any food that us unwelcome visitors to their domain had left scattered after our nocturnal meal, yet under this cacophony of sound the silence remained, a universal stillness.

Soon the searching monkeys disappeared, and the silence returned to be broken by the sound of African voices coming from the nearby kraal where they campsite workers slept, the next break in my solitude was the awakening of my son and his friend who everyday did a five-hour hike into the Tonquani and Cederberg Gorges.

 

It was then that I indulged in another of my passions, reading.

My son had brought two books with him from the UK, the first was about the life of Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, a former colonel of the KGB who became the resident-designate and bureau chief at the soviet embassy in London. He became an agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1974 while working in Denmark and continued supplying MI6 with valuable information till 1985. Ben McIntyre’s book “The Spy and the Traitor” proved to be sensational reading.

Oleg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the cold war. For eleven years, he spied for MI6. It was remarkable he managed to deceive his KGB colleagues during this time. Even more astounding was that in summer 1985 – after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses – British intelligence officers helped him to escape. It was the only time that the spooks managed to exfiltrate a penetration agent from the USSR, outwitting their Russian adversaries.

The famous author John Le Care says on the back cover, “The best spy book I’ve ever read!”

The second book was “Our Everest Challenge” by Ben Fogle and his wife, Marina who he calls from the world’s highest peak.

This book was also a riveting read. Fogle summited Mount Everest on the 16^th of May 2018, completing the climb over a six-week period whilst accompanied by two local Sherpa guides, as well as Kenton Cool, a 44-year-old veteran British climber who has summited Everest 12 times. His trek also included former Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton, who unfortunately had to abandon her attempt early due to severe altitude sickness.

Throughout the book he speaks of “Looking-Up” and constantly harangues the young Techno-geeks who spend 24 hours a day looking down at their smart phones.

His advice certainly was useful at Mountain Sanctuary Park where the clear night sky became our television set, causing long discussions as to where the Southern-Cross was and which flickering star was the planet Venus.

The routine of early morning tea, silence contemplation and book reading was followed for three days however, the four morning was different.

I was awoken as usual at approximately five fifteen, except this time it was by a strange sound of general confusion coming from the central lounge and kitchen area. I wandered into the toilet to be greeted at the open window by a snarling face of an aggressive Vervet monkey. I backed cautiously out of the toilet as four other younger Vervets scurried past me in the corridor and out of the toilet window.

I moved from the corridor into the lounge to face a sight of what I can describe as nuclear devastation, accompanied by a high pitch screaming from a very young Vervet monkey clinging to the burglar bars of a window. The scream was amplified with the returning screams of the whole troop of fifteen or so monkeys outside. I approached the youngster slowly and after a few more anxious screams it leapt off the burglar bars and scampered out of the room to find its freedom through the toilet window.

Glancing at the devastation caused by the invasion I could see, banana skins, half eaten apples, empty plastic wrappers that once contained bread, a scattered bag of sugar strewn over the kitchen work-top and floor and several deposits of monkey shit and pools of urine.

Using torn-off strips of toilet roll I got all the shite into the loo and then began sweeping up the sugar and discarded bits of bread, banana skins and bits of half chewed apple. Having brushed the table and work-tops clear of all the half-eaten scraps of food, I began wiping all the surfaces with a wet cloth disinfected in diluted-Dettol and then I mopped the floor.

Half an hour later, having completed the household chores I made my morning mug-of-tea and sat down outside to let nature’s silence calm my befuddled head.

To misquote Francis Bacon, I let the silence of sleep nourish my wisdom.

I was awoken about an hour later by my son shaking my shoulder and asking me to try and make some breakfast for him and his mate, Lloyd. Luckily, the Vervets had not managed to invade the fridge, so in twenty minutes I was serving up fried bacon, eggs, mushrooms and four buttered crisp-bread biscuits to all of us.

Lloyd and my son told me, “We’re going up to the top of the range, find Red Gulley and then climb down Tonquani Gorge.”

They quickly packed their knapsacks with provisions for the five-hour-hike and after I had warned them to look out for snakes, particularly the Boomslang which hides in the tree branches that jut out of the cracks in the gorge’s wall, off they went to exercise their nimble and youthful limbs, while I sat reading and absorbing………. 

The Silence!

More Questions Answered.

When it comes to films and TV productions in which I have appeared, is much more difficult to select my most enjoyable.

According to information gleaned from the WWW and IMB I have been credited in more than one hundred and fifty TV shows and film productions so, as you can imagine it would be almost impossible to select one to put at the top of my favourites list.

Do I select from my most bizarre locations like the jungles of Malaysia when I filmed Who am I? with Jackie Chan?

Or do I go back to my first TV job when I appeared in Dixon of Dock Green way back in the early seventies? 

The central character was a mature and sympathetic police constable, George Dixon, played by Jack Warner in all the 432 episodes, from 1955 to 1976.

This famous police drama, voted second most popular programme on British TV in 1961, was filmed at the BBC White City studios and as an actor almost straight out of drama school it was certainly eventful and terrifying. Just to be working alongside Jack Warner who played the title role was a huge honour. The character Dixon was the embodiment of a typical "bobby" who would be familiar with the area and its residents in which he patrolled and often lived there himself.

In Warner’s auto-biography he tells of a visit by the Queen to the studios, where she commented "that she thought Dixon of Dock Green had become part of the British way of life".

Warner's success as Dixon was also popular amongst various police forces. He was made an honorary member of both the Margate and Ramsgate Police Forces in the 1950s. Warner said of Dixon of Dock Green: "It has been a very good meal ticket for twenty-one years—although the taxman has never been far behind."

Or, do I select the mountains of land-locked Lesotho, where I played a fanatical Arab, Sheik Maksood, one of the first of many Muslim militants who was planning to use a suitcase-nuke to erase New York from the face of the earth. This was in the filming of American Ninja 5 with David Bradley and Michael Dudikoff?

I do have some very pleasant memories of shooting Shaka Zulu and later in the eighties the story of John Ross. Both these were shot with the base camp in Eshowe, declared the capital of Zululand in 1887, and was visited by the British Royal family in 1947. It is in central Zululnd near the Dlinza Forest, in central Qua-Zulu-Natal.

Shakaland, now a major international tourist hotel was originally built for the filming of Shaka Zulu. It is now a living monument to Zulu culture.  It is from here that people from all over the world come to experience the lifestyles, social systems and rich culture of the Zulu nation.  It is said that a visit to South Africa is not complete without a visit to Shakaland.  It is a traditional Zulu “Umuzi” or homestead, dividing the homes of the local Zulu people and the hotel rooms.

Most of our filming for both these shoots was about 70 kilometres away in a pace called Disappointment Bay just south of the Tugela river mouth and I had a glorious time there eating freshly caught mussels and crayfish.

And, I must admit that Munich holds a desire to be revisited just for the German beer and multitude of sausages I consumed while filming a movie that I can’t remember the name of, probably because I never got paid for it, but I do remember sipping ice cold beers in the English Gardens.

I also remember being trapped in a Range Rover when an unexpected tropical storm hit the location, we were filming near the Olympic stadium when the heavens opened and half of Munich was suddenly under three feet of water, The whole crew and cast that was on call that day were stranded until the flash flood had subsided. Luckily, I had a book of Suduko puzzles with me and Toddie was full.

Another project on which I and another ten actors were stranded was a French movie called, as the working-title Crime in the Gabon, it was shown as “Le Crime de monsieur Stil”, directed by Ms Claire Devers. We were left marooned in the one-horse town of Poffadder which is near the Namibian border after the final day of the shoot.

The crew and the transport manager had all scarpered forgetting to collect us, we made ourselves at home in the Poffadder Hotel, until the owner decided we were going to drink his establishment dry, He loaded us into his Kombi van and drove us like a demented-Schumacher to Upington airport where we flew back to Johannesburg,

This was an eventful shoot as all us local English-speaking actors had to speak French. I was an arduous affair and even with the help of a dialogue coach in French we once took over 70 takes to shoot a night scene. It would have been hard enough in English as the French director wanted the whole scene in one hand help tracking shot, the poor cameraman darted between nine actors trying to pick up each conversation in the bar. It was a memorable occasion and the film won an award in France!

I have already written about my shoot with Jackie Chan in a couple of previous posts. I spent over six weeks in Rotterdam while Jackie kept postponing the scenes I had with him as they were full of dialogue, he preferred the action scenes where he cold display his magnificent ability by sliding down glass-built skyscrapers and defeating his opponents with Dutch wooden clogs on.

I spent most of my time befriending the local Dutch production drivers who were send weekly to numerous other towns with a briefcase full of cash to pay the local companies who were hired on the production. I accompanied them to Amsterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven, and even crossed the border once to the Hague in Belgium. Otherwise I toured Rotterdam on their excellent tramway system with my “Plonkie”, a ticket one could buy weekly which allowed you to hop trams to various destinations in the far reaches of the city.

The trams were a cheap delight for my wanderings, far more enjoyable than riding a motor bike with a side car attached. I had to learn to do this when I filmed in the late seventies on a TV drama called my friend Angelo,

I was taught by the great stuntman the late Janie Wienand who had me careering down open tarmacked roads and across the open veld steering past rocks, boulders and up and down dongas in no time. I became so versatile that the director David Lister, with whom I shoot my movies, let me do my own stunts apart from the dangerous ones.

At times I had a young actor who played my second in command as the passenger in the sidecar. He too had to have lessons as the swinging from right to left in a sidecar is crucial when taking corners.

So, as you can see from the over 150 productions I have been in it is very difficult for me to choose the most enjoyable, but I can say that as regarding erring an income I still receive a repeat fee from airings of a job I did way back in 1972. The piece, Pendas Fen still gets shown across the world today and because of the stringent British equity laws a few pounds finds its way into my bank account.

So, I’ll pick that one. I think its available on U-tube so have a look and help keeping those payments into my account. Thank you.

Please comment.

Another Back-Slapping Event

It happened today, a Saturday.

It started at about eight in the morning when I went in search of a DPDT electrical switch. That’s a double pole double throw switch to the uniformed.

I needed this as the Metop rotary switch that I worked on last week did not function correctly. It reversed the polarity I needed to feed to the motor’s starter winding, but as soon as I switched it on it tripped my Earth Leakage, This confused me but I soon figured out that I was connecting negative to positive at the starter junction, I spent some more time on the fact-finding internet and discovered I needed the DPDT switch specially designed to reverse polarity.

I decided on paying a call on an electrical wholesaler, who I knew stocked most items required when one re-wires a house, I’d visited them on numerous occasions in the past and they were very agreeable to a ten percent discount if you paid in cash.

It was a twenty-minute drive over to Albertskroon and I said hello to the manager, Adam, a very affable Asian chap. I had waited till the weekend as I knew on Friday he would be closed, as he had to attend his Muslim lunchtime rituals, which sometimes extended well into the afternoon with a feast of assorted samosas and kneeling to the east.

“Hi, how’s it Adam.”

“Can’t complain,” he replied, “what can I do for you Cess?”

“I’m looking for a DPDT switch so that I can reverse the polarity to the starter winding of a motor to get it spinning anticlockwise,”

His jaw dropped, conveying that he had not the foggiest idea what I was talking about.

“Sorry, what’s that?”

“It’s a switch with six terminals, two for the positive and neutral inputs, and four others that you cross-bridge, and then you take leads to the motor you wish to run in reverse.”

He still looked none the wiser.

“The guys that know all that stuff don’t work on a Saturday, I’m sorry.”

“You got a computer? Google a DPDT switch.”

“OK,” and he ambled to the far end of the counter replying in about twenty seconds, “Oh I see. Ja, an illuminated rocker switch, off and two ons.”

“That’s what I want, you got?”

“Err…... no. I have seen them in the shop, but not in a while.”

“Oh, well that’s great. Can you help me with ten 4mm ferrels, ten 10mm ferrels, a 2 x4 metal box, and a blank 4 x 4 bank cover plate with the skeleton behind it.”

“Plastic or metal?”

“Whichever is the cheaper.”

“Plastic, only twelve Rand,”

“That’ll do. You can tot it up, thanks.”

“All in all, forty bucks, cash?

“Great, yeah. Do you know where I might get a DPDT?”

“There’s an appliance repair shop near the Checkers just down the road and a Cash-Crusaders, right next door and there’s Mickles. You could try them.”

“Cash-Crusaders, they’re a porn shop, aren’t they?”

“Ja, but you never know.”

Paying my forty Rand and exiting with my plastic bag of goodies I departed, “See ya Adam.”

Another four-minute drive to the Checkers site, where I found Cash-Crusaders, the appliance repairer, but not a sight of Mickles. Even the parking attendants had never heard of it and the Cash-Crusaders didn’t open till nine o’clock. I ventured into the appliance shop to be greeted by a smiling young African lady. We exchanged pleasantries but when I mentioned the DPDT switch she gave the African reply, “Eeeeeeish! The boss will be coming soon”

I departed.

My ageing grey hard drive was perplexed, I rebooted with a slug from Toddie in my bakkie and stretched my memory to a past time I had been in this area, when suddenly another electrical wholesaler sprang into my head. It was on Ontdekkers Road about ten minutes away, I steered the bakkie in what I thought was the right direction.

Wrong.

I ended up in the back streets of Albertskroon but facing me was a very large hardware and building depot which sported the huge sign which announced, “Electrical goods!”

Worth a try I thought, and I sauntered inside to be told that they didn’t have a DPDT switch but I should try Kelec Electrical about two kilometres further down Ontdekkers Road.

“Its number is 360 and Ontdekkers is just around the corner.” Said the over-weight salesman. Feeling elated that my navigational skills were still OK  I climbed into my bakkie and headed off to Kelec.

Ten minutes later, and I was clutching the switch that cost 38 Rand, a bargain!

I drove to my abode dumbfounded that it was only half past nine and set to change into my acting-electrician wardrobe.

For me to now go into the intricacies of my use of the angle grinder, drill, pliers and screw drivers, Phillip’s and straight, ferrels and insulation tape would probably bore you, but I do have to mention how I Magyvered the plastic 4 x4 cover plate so that I could insert my DPDT switch and end up with my completed project.

This required the use of my drill with a three-millimetre bit.

I carefully marked, with a black Cokie pen, the cover-plate with the dimensions of the switch and starting in the centre, I drilled out a rectangular hole. This a tedious job as making a rectangular hole with a round drill bit is like a child trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, almost impossible; however, with the use of a Stanley knife blade the task was completed.

The 4 x 4 box on the left houses the DPDT switch and joint-bar for electrical connections, the wires coming out lead to the starter winding and the running winding of the motor, a brown and blue to each winding, and the recycled double-switch on the right, from my scrap box, is the mains switch for the whole set-up, cutting off both the live and neutral wires, which enter the 2 x 4 box on the far right.

The whole operation, on display below, took approximately four hours and after several test runs of the motor making sure it ran correctly in clockwise and anti-clockwise directions.

I felt the need of a bit of back-slapping and self-administered congratulations.

I refilled my Toddie with some Groot-Marico mampoer I had saved from my trip to that Charles Herman Bosman part of South Africa and had a stupendous, well-deserved back-slapping and thirst quenching time!

The Gambles in Life

Do you ever call it a day and say you’ve had enough, you’ve travelled and gone far enough? Taken as much as you stand?

Well, when it comes to TV programmes I’m definitely a yes-man to all the above questions!

When it comes to Quiz programmes, they are an immediate channel changer for me.

Not all of them however.

One of my favourites is the BBC’s programme with Stephen Fry and now Sandy Toksvig called “QI” and again the BBC with “Would I lie to you” hosted by Rob Brydon and with David Mitchel and Lee Mack captaining the opposing teams.

Both shows are examples of top-notch British comedy at its peak with fantastic guest artists, comprised of comedians, musicians, actors and even a priest or two.

However, down at the bottom and immediate channel-changers are “Deal or No Deal” with Noel Edmunds as the host, and “Tipping Point” presented by Ben Shephard. I have to admit that “Pointless” hosted by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman  has me in a quandary that falls into no-mans-land, sometimes I can watch and other times I switch channels.

It is, I believe, an aversion that stems from my youth, when I worked for some time as a small-change boy on Blackpool’s Golden Mile amusement arcade.

 It is an aversion to gambling,  caused by the number of fights, crying children in prams and battered mothers lying in the gutter, that I saw whilst I did the job.

It was a simple job, I would wander around the arcade carrying a leather shoulder bag with several compartments filled with small change. In the late fifties when I had the job, it was filled with pennies, threepences, sixpences, shillings, and half-a-crowns, the latter being worth two shillings and sixpence. I had special secret zipped compartment where I placed the paper notes that I had exchanged for small change.

Once I had more than ten pound in paper notes I had to return it to the office, as mugging of small-change-boys was a common occurrence.

Most of the visitors to Blackpool were at that time from the working class manual labouring towns of the industrial North of England, Scotland and Wales. Miners, cotton and wool factory workers, steel foundry workers, furnace feeders, bricklayers and construction labourers. It was their annual summer holiday and they came with hard earned wages stuffed in their back pockets and secretly hoped they would win a fortune at the slot machines on the Golden Mile.

Obviously, that was not what happened.

Gambling like another pet-hate, insurance companies; they both feed off hope, desperation and fear; these are basic human emotions. The faces I see today on the TV quiz shows remind me of those faces I saw as I exchanged a last Pound note to a losing holiday-maker.

Family violence has always been an enormous problem in communities throughout the world. In fact, a recent survey found that in Australia one in three Australian women have experienced physical violence from a current or former partner, and one in four have experienced emotional abuse by a current or former partner.

The survey also showed that there is a clear link between problem gambling and intimate partner violence, children, parents and grandparents are also the victims of violence perpetrated by those with significant gambling problems.

A memory that stays with me goes way back to nineteen fifty-five which resulted in the calling of the local constabulary, the ambulance service and the local social services, which at the time were almost non-existent.

It was a Saturday lunch time when a Glaswegain labourer Ken, his young wife, Monica and six-month-old baby in his pram arrived at the arcade. The baby had a small teddy-bear with him and he squeezed it with delight while he sucked on a full bottle of milk.

“I’ll change my last Tenner,” said Ken, “Sixpences, threepences, and pennies” he said to me, while he looked at his wife as though asking for approval. Monica shrugged in a non-committed way.

“And that’s it?” she added.

“Aye, gotta be, I ain’t got more!” he said in a subdued semi-belligerent tone,

“But y’ still got the ‘oliday-flat money?”

“Aye, I left it there!” he added, “as y’ told mi to!”

“Good.”

I could already sense that the two of them had had a serious conversation on the money situation before they came down to the Golden Mile.

It was about two thirty in the afternoon when the rumpus started, the sound of screaming brought myself and Stan, the arcade manger, to the front of the arcade. A small area of pavement that allowed the passing pedestrians to walk by our arcade and allow them to move on to find another venue that conned them into thinking that they might find their fortune.

When we arrived, the pram was on its side with the baby crying, trying to reach his teddy bear and finished bottle lying in the gutter. Ken had his hands around Monica’s throat and was shaking her violently. Stan made his way to Ken screaming at me, “Call the fucking cops lad!”

I turned to go to the back office, seeing Stan receive a flying right arm jab to the face, sending him crashing to the ground.

I called the cops explaining what happened and told them to come quickly before darting back to the concussed Stan.

“We’ve gotta get ‘em apart!” said Stan as I helped him up.

Stan leapt on Ken’s back and I attempted my best rugby tackle on his thighs. Our joint assault on Ken gave Monica a chance to free herself and went straight to the upturned baby.

By the Grace of God and to our luck the Black-Mariah filled with six policemen pulled up and sprang into action pulling myself and Stan off a slightly subdued Ken.

By now a watching crowd had surrounded us, and while four of the coppers tried to hold them back, the other two dealt with Ken, who by now had found his second-wind and was struggling with them as they tried to get him handcuffed. A third copper finally came over and got the cuffs on him.

Meanwhile Monica was sobbing uncontrollably while clutching her baby. After a short collection of statements by the senior officer, Constable Hardgeaves, Stan escorted Monica back to his office and ordered me to get on with my job.

The fracas had brought in many more customers and the arcade was almost at bursting point. I had to squeeze myself through the throng and be constantly aware of that other villainy that had befallen me before; pick-pockets delving into my shoulder bag.

At about four o’clock in the afternoon we received another visit from the police, this time they were detectives and a single uniformed constable. Luckily Monica was still with Stan in his office. She had chosen to stay there as returning to their accommodation would have reminded her of her time in there with Ken.

She retold her story she had told Stan. She had said that everyday Ken had physically attacked her and forced her to hand over their holiday savings so that he could play the slot-machines. About an hour later the detective asked me to make a full statement. I had to recall every detail as to what I saw the couple doing, the time and their position in the arcade, what machine Ken was playing, and what time he was at each machine. All the time I was praying that they would not search me and find my hidden “Toddie” in my trousers’ back pocket.

I knew that a Yate’s Wine Lodge sipping minor would not be a good witness for the prosecution.

It felt worse than a school test and by six o’clock I was exhausted, they said I could go home after I’d signed the statement that had been written down by the constable. They also warned me that I must tell my mother about the whole incident and that I would be asked to attend the trial in court, probably in about two weeks’ time.

Just as I was about to board a tram to take me home another official vehicle arrived carrying a driver and two meticulously dressed middle-aged ladies.

The last sight I saw was of Monica screaming on the pavement as one of the ladies carried the baby to their car whist the other wheeled the pram and placed it in the boot of the car.

To this day, seventy odd years later, that vision of Monica resurfaces as I watch the faces of losing contestants on TV quiz-shows.

Yep, an aversion to TV quiz shows and a loathing even a hatred of gambling!