Soundtrack to my Life: "Only You" by The Flying Pickets

Artist: The Flying Pickets
Track: Only You/Label: Ten/Album: Lost Boys/Release: 26th November 1983/Highest Chart Position: 1


My father had crabs. Crabs from the sea, that is.

On a weekly basis, he used to venture out into the very early morning and make his way down to the sea front to meet the trawlers on the beach and enter into a bargaining war with the fishermen for their morning catches. He would then prepare these wares himself and sell onto the people of East Cleveland. From this source he used to produce many things but the main source of his work was from crabs. When he returned to Kent Close mid morning with the large bags of shellfish, he often took over the kitchen before readying his station at the living room table in preparation for his working day.

On Saturday Morning, the kitchen was my father’s domain and were were to keep out.

Now to some, The Flying Pickets’ now classic acapella christmas success of 1983, Only You was the first acapella song to reach number one with a timeless video full of despair and working class melancholy. To us, it was that but much more.

It was also the crab boiling song.

After the needle hit the vinyl of the record, he would lay out the free newspapers on the living room table as the crabs simmered away in a huge pot on the stove.

“Da Da... Da Da... Da Da Da Da...” he chanted tunelessly. Da Da Da Da... Only You...”

As the creatures boiled alive, a whistling cry echoed throughout the house before dying down to just the vast bubbling of the pot. All of this was often the early morning alarm call in the Farley household and when the silence of death arrived, this was when we all knew that the next part of the day was almost upon us.

The shells were poured into our sink and the cold water tap was run onto them in order for them to be prepared and then dressed for sale. When we were good or bugged him enough, he would let us join him at the table and pick at the crab meat he burrowed from the cooked shells, as he ensured he got every last sliver of sea flesh from the carcass. He would often tell us off if he discovered us eating too much as every last bit was a possible profit but secretly he didn't mind.

I have to admire the resiliance and passion in the man. He may not have wanted to work but he put his heart and soul into the one form of self employment/conning the state that he put his mind to. As he hunched over the crab shells to crack the legs open to forrage for the precious white meat, my job was usually the separation of the brown and pink meat from the main shells. To dress a crab, it is a careful skill that initially involves separating the different colours of meat and then rearranging them back into the upturned and hollowed shell in an attractive pattern or fashion. My father was a crab dressing machine often producing about 40-60 a day.

With his special mix of meat thinned out with pepper and salad cream (there was no such thing as mayonnaise in 1980’s North East England), he could easily produce a 20% increase in product and along with the prices he used to charge around the local pubs in Redcar and Middlesbrough, this is often what kept our family tied over for some weeks as well as the benefits we were receiving on top. I didn’t like the idea of this obvious dissention and cheating of the system even back then, but when you are poor, you have to be creative and trust that your parents knew what they were doing. Especially when those profits often never left the pubs they were made in the first place.

My father quickly learned the essential business skills to keep his venture afloat. Everytime a member of immediate or extended family came to our home, they left with a seafood salad item or if we (on a rare occasion) were invited to a relative’s for a traditional sunday, festive or seasonal meeting, my father would be there with his dressed crabs. Not as a gift like Mediterranean families would offer to you as a parting gesture for their effort in visiting them or similarily you to them for their hospitality, my father would instead always have to bring up the awkward question of payment after they had taken the crab into their hands. All of this only led to the eventual rows as when he wasn’t selling crabs to my family, he was borrowing money from them. I’m sure he learned all of his marketing techniques from Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours and I’m suspecting that Social Security put him on some sort of selling night course.

It got to the point where my relatives stopped coming round in fear of Arkwright, my father, who a lot of the time embarrassed my mother and her side of the family. She put it down to one of his initial eccentricities before they married but ended up avoiding my household for the most part of the time, in fear of leaving with a chilled seafood snack.

When times were hard and the locals were sick of my father’s award winning fayre, you can probably imagine what our diet consisted of. I was sick of crab and crab began to make me sick. There’s only so much you can do with a crab as well, ask Nigel Slater. With the basic food training my mother had from her parents and our budgets, there was no room for such things as bisques and souffles. They just didn’t exist back then. I began to resent the little sideways walking bastards and bits of white flesh after a time and the poverty they represented within our household. The mere mention of one of the shelled creatures at one point often brought a dark cloud over Redcar and the shouting from all members of the family resumed.

On top of this, my father didn’t appreciate the early comedy sarcasm I was picking up from the likes of The Young Ones and The Lenny Henry Show either, especially when I entered into the room and announced things like,

“What’s tonight then? Crab and....?”

There were times though like in the summer when demand for my father’s dressed crabs was at a high and he had no choice but to enlist myself and often my sister around the table armed with our forks and once again we found ourselves swaying along with my father and the Da Da Da’s.

When he got going, he would sell the crabs to anyone and often got so eager he was coaxed by my mother into doing the most mundane but essential jobs like picking me up from school as long as there might have been a marketing opportunity lying in wait for him and his wares, such as the other parents and even my teachers. There he was as I trudged up the path, waiting with his hands buried in his deep pockets attempting to charm his way into a sale, brandishing his decorative shells.

“Dad, put your crabs away...” I pleaded.

Along with the crabs, he often returned with Cod, which he filleted and sold to the chippy in the square on Lakes Estate. When our finances couldn’t stretch to Cod, he came back with Ling instead, which were also filleted but passed off as Cod or mixed with batches of the more superior fish. Being a cheaper fish, this reaped even more of a profit when he was successful. The chippy didn’t know the difference. It was a lot easier to hoodwink people in those days, I guess.

There were also whelks and winkles which went into a separate pot and were bagged up to sell alongside the crabs or in the pubs. I loved my father but he was a rogue, and he wasn’t even a good rogue at that either. Even I could tell that when I was six or seven. He always had some sort of scheme brewing or idea for self employment, but none of these ideas ever stretched to the success of his crab dressing business, which was the main focus over the other sea fayre he dealt in. He tried his hand at selling the usual knock offs from a bag. Jeans, trainers and perfumes, not to mention trying to make money off the horses which he didn’t quite seem to grasp, never works.

He got lucky the once and we celebrated like I never saw again. He won like a hundred pounds, we all went shopping and bought loads of groceries and got things we all liked. He even took my mother out for a Babycham that night. She made a big fuss and even went out and got her hair done.

We rented from the council and relied solely from the government in the times he wasn’t in and out of some menial job that he soon came to an end with his frustration or idleness.
The longest he came into contact with serious employment was when he was shipped over to the Falkland Islands to help rebuild the destroyed airport after the war. It seemed like he was gone for years. He returned like a conquoring hero brandishing gifts for his children and he acted like some sort of martyr when he returned at what he had gone through to provide money for his family.

Despite the Argentines having long gone from the area, he was talking like he was actually in the war to people, it was all a bit confusing when I was younger. I wondered for a time whether he actually was part of the action, or post-action as it were. He was back in a matter of weeks though and the only thing I’m sure he had to face were hundreds of bags of Tarmac.

My mum loved it, for the first time in a long time, she was left in charge of the finances. She got someone in to put curtains up in the house finally. Front and back. We had been there two years already and hadn’t had the opportunity to before.

You can imagine how well this went down with my father upon his grand return, he was pretty angry and she had made his position in the house that much more inferior. She proved a small point that day in how much he drained her and brought the family down in the process and my mother got her first taste of freedom, laying the groundwork and confidence in her heart for events in later years. She had managed without him and made the place look half decent. She had also made him look like a fool though and he never let her forget it.

Consequently, he never went away to work again and I haven’t eaten damn crab since either.