Uncle Jack
Uncle Jack [was alright] - Apart from when he was jumping up and down on our pushbikes, like I told you before.
He was a clever old stick though. Oh you give him a bit of tin and a soldering iron and then in next to no time he had a motorbike made for yer. Course you had to pay for your own licence like.
He was a clever old stick, he could make anything in that old shed of his, he had a forge, he had everything down there.
And the things he used to make was nobody’s business. I can honestly say, and safely say – and Jim’ll tell you this, course all the old timers are gone now, they couldn’t tell, I doubt if anybody remembers in the street now, but I can safely say that he was the first one in Iffley Road who owned a motor car, and a motor bike, but the motor car I know, he made himself out of scraps and odds and ends.
Mind you, I ain’t gonna say he’d get away with it now like. He’d have the Noise Abatement Society after him I suppose, but I remember he made when we was only youngsters. And there was about, ooh how many of us were there out in the street? There must’ve been a dozen of us. Come on, he’d say. Pile aboard! So we piled aboard, went up Rodbourne Lane and down Morris Street and all the way round, he gave us a good old old run round.
Then he had an old motorbike, I suppose him and old George Lewis were the first ones in the street to have a motorbike. Uncle Jack used to have a side car and used to take Aunt Edie, we got photos here somewhere. He used to take her all over the place.
He made his own washing machine. He made his own hoover, y’know, a cleaning machine, long before the Japs jumped to the damned things, let alone making them.
Oh yes, he had his head screwed on. I think if he’d had a bit of money behind him, he could have gone a long way.
We used to think he couldn’t have gone far enough in those days.
