By this time Harry had got married to Valerie Hazelton and I started to go out with Reggie Jackson, Lennie Hooker and Brian Eastop.
I had by then brought my first car a 1952 ford V8 Pilot black in colour and in good nick.
We were very smart dressers and we used to go up to Maxie Cohen one of the best Jewish tailors in East London, his shop was by the side of Aldgate bus terminus and his suits cost 25 pounds each and his Crombie overcoats were 20 pounds and as we were only earning about fourteen pounds a week you can see how dear they were, we had two or three fittings and looked quite smart, every time we went up to Aldgate for our fittings we visited Tubby Issacs jellied eel stall on the corner of Petticoat Lane and the Mile End Road (his jellied eels were acknowledged as the best in London).
I was also a Teddy Boy with my fingertip length velvet collared jacket and pockets, drainpipe trousers, and shoe lace tie, not forgetting the thick brothel creeper shoes and brightly coloured socks. Every weekend Reggie, Lennie, Brian and myself used to go up to the Big Smoke (London ) for drinking sessions and visited all of the well known pubs such as The Thomas A Becket and The World Turned Upside Down in the Old Kent Road, The Blind Beggar and the Hospital Tavern in the Mile End Road and the Dew Dragon in Hackney who used to put on a drag show every Sunday morning.
It was a good thing that there was no breathalyzer in those days because although we never got really drunk we were always over the limit. On the way home we would sometimes call in the Green Gate at Ilford for the stage show and they had a singer who thought he was Frank Sinatra.
As I have said when we were drinking we never got drunk, we were always in complete control of our faculties although I did get drunk one Easter down the Monica, we decided to be posh and have liqueurs after every glass of beer, I was drinking drambuie which is a lovely sweet scotch liqueur when I finally wobbled down the back path into our garden I was as sick as a dog over the wire fence of the chicken run, for a week the chooks were pissed and egg production fell but did they look happy. In the summer months we stopped going to London and went drinking in Southend-on Sea as it was full of day trippers who came from London on coach outings
and there was always plenty of singing and dancing going on plus a fair bit of crumpet.
Every weekend scores of charabancs (coaches) used to come down to Southend on day trips to be beside the seaside and, in the autumn to see the lights, on the way home they stopped at a pub for a drink and a sing-song they were usually three parts pissed when they left Southend
the usual stops were the Tarpots pub at Benfleet or the Crown pub at Pitsea, these pubs were only a 25 minute drive from Canvey so we used to go over there looking for a kiss and a cuddle we always had a good time singing and dancing with the tipsy birds and many a promise was made and broken (we had no scruples then).Well I mean you were asked some silly questions such as "Will you come up to London to see me? "Do you love me?. "Please give me your address so I can write to you" (of course we never gave our real address) and all of these silly questions were being asked whilst we were trying to get into their pants, so naturally you promised the world and reneged when the coach left. (Well what would you have done?.)
Lennie was regularly out of work but we always took him out with us because he was our friend and we knew when he was in work he would spend all of his money on us.