12 Five o'clock Club

It amused me to hear second year pupil Stephen Boneywell screeching the la, la la bit from Speedy Gonzales, in a suitably high pitched voice, on the way out of school one day. At eight years old I wasn’t that well up on pop music, but I knew that song.

A song I did like was Wooden Heart by Elvis, so when classmate Brian Stammer produced a printed lyric of the song from his big sister’s pop magazine, I had to have it. A swap deal, agreed at the top of the steps outside the school toilets, was sealed when Brian accepted one of my prized possessions in return; a plastic camel.

I knew other Elvis songs too. A single my mother owned had Little Sister on one side and His Latest Flame on the other. If her small record collection was anything to go by then Mam had to be a fan of Elvis, the Everly Brothers and a chap called Charlie Kunz. Not so, I learned years later. She wouldn’t have owned any of those records if they hadn’t come with the purchase of a second hand record player, which she bought for us to play the only record she did buy; a Frankie Laine LP featuring the Rawhide theme, which we loved. No matter, between listening to Rawhide and other cowboy songs, the Everly Brothers got the occasional play and so did Elvis, though ‘the reason ain’ in the lyric of His Latest Flame made no sense at all. (The answer to this misheard lyric was right under my nose, in brackets on the record label, yet I failed to spot it for years.)

As the tunes of the day were frequently heard on the wireless, and pop stars regularly turned up on Children’s TV programmes, some knowledge of pop music couldn’t help but be acquired. One such programme was Five o’clock Club, presented by Wally Whyton and Muriel Young.  Bert Weedon and wildlife expert Grahame Dangerfield were regular guests on the show but to most kids, Five o’clock Club’s biggest stars were puppets Pussy Cat Willum, Ollie Beak and Fred Barker.

A B C D E goodbye from Willum and me
F G H I J we'll see you another day
K L M N O it's time for us to go
P Q R S T and the cat went fiddle-I-dee, fiddle-I-dee, fiddle-I-dee.

A paint box proved to be a bigger attraction than Five o’clock Club on the day I joined next door neighbour Brendan Wright in his house after school. One thing led to another and before long we were painting each other's faces and standing on a chair to laugh at our handiwork in a mirror on the kitchen wall. And great fun it was, until we heard the front door open and Brendan went to investigate. It was his mum and when she saw the state of him, she went potty. With the sound of Brendan's murder ringing in my ears, I fled out of the back door and dashed across the back of our shared alley (between 41 and 43 Crundale Road) to the safety of my own home where I hurried, unseen, to the bathroom to scrub away the potentially damning evidence.