| Chapter 1: | Revisiting Fred Ball: Reminisces on One of The Damned |
|
|
After a while he came to the conclusion that these were all “a total waste of time” and did not measure up to his own ideas at all.
However, on a later occasion my father caught a bus and gave the conductor a shilling, asking him to drop him off wherever the shilling ran out. At the end of the journey, the bus stopped right outside a spiritualist church, so Dad, deciding this was fate, went to sit at the back to listen to the service. The service was led by a medium and Dad suddenly became aware that the medium was referring to him when he said, “there is a young man sitting at the back looking very troubled. I can see this man with a pen in his hand writing poetry”. He went on to say that this man should keep pursuing his writing because in five years time he would be successful. It was just five years later Fred had his first poem published.
After failing as a plumber’s apprentice, Dad was sent by my grandmother to be a shop boy at the Sainsbury’s supermarket. Although he disliked this job, he actually did very well and became the youngest manager in the store, at the age of nineteen. As he matured he became aware of the total dishonesty and abuse of the employers towards the working classes, and he greatly disliked the hypocrisy that went with it. This partly came about due to his experiences in this London store. The experience was to resurface later in Fred’s novel called Blossom Brothers and Smelsweet, a behind-the-scenes exposé of life in a large grocery store.
Later, my father decided that this job was not for him and, much to his mother’s dismay, he resigned and moved back to Hastings, where he joined the Labour Party and became actively involved in meeting likeminded people. My father expanded his basic education by attending Workers’ Educational Association lectures and extramural classes, and by reading a lot of books. He even read the dictionary each day to expand his vocabulary. Dad met many fine teachers through the WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) and did a teacher’s course that would enable him to enter a university and become a full-fledged teacher.