It was a tough old assignment (and freezing in winter) but I quickly became very adept at skinning sheeps heads (in those days when a butcher bought a carcass he got everything including the head and the offal), taking particularly delight in popping and gouging out the eyes. Once skinned the gleaming skulls were sold to a bone merchant with the flesh pressed and sold as dog meat. My best average was twenty heads an hour, a record still unbeaten for an eleven year old.

Sausage making was another speciality of mine. The saga started every Wednesday evening with the measuring out of the white (pork) and pink (beef) meal grain into prepared containers, to which was added either minced beef or pork. A salt solution was then added and the mixture (plus some added seasoning) left to ferment in the large walk-in refrigerator. Late on the Friday night the mixture was pressed down into a large red cylindrical device that looked like an old water pump from the 19th century which had a nozzle protruding from the bottom onto which you placed a long length of salted sheeps intestines. Then, with large tin trays placed at the ready, you started to turn the handle at the side of the pump, which pressed down a piston that forced out the sausage meat at an alarming rate into the waiting length of intestine, which, with your left hand, you twisted every three inches or so, making sausages – thousands, millions, of the things. I loved it.

I hated the visits to the slaughterhouses in Stratford. I have memories of those killing sheds that haunt me to this day, but at least I knew where meat came from and the agonies for both man and beast in its production. Meat arrives silently these days.

One job I didn’t like, at first, was the scrubbing and cleaning, but I eventually took pride in a gleaming dry-scrubbed chopping block, or a well cleaned pickle barrel where only the very hottest water and soda crystals could be used in the cleansing process.

But mostly, and this is very Norman Wisdom, I loved delivering the orders every Saturday morning on the bicycle with a large basket at the front, especially to the RAF officers houses on the outskirts of the airfield, and the twenty minutes of snogging delight with a young girl who I’d rather taken a fancy to. I can smell that hallway and her soapiness now.

” Who’s that, dear?” Her mother would call.

” Just the butcher’s boy, mother, he’s describing how he makes sausages.”

” Lovely, but don’t be too long, dear.”

” No, mother.”

” Good. And make sure you give him a tip.”

” Yes, mother.”

Back in those dark days of the 1950s and 1960s butchers used newspapers to wrap their meat, and in the case of Cooke’s it was invariable the Daily Express. And for me the big delight of the week was cutting-up those papers and reading the continuing adventures of TinTin, and Rupert the Bear. What I wouldn’t have given for a pair of trousers like his.

I also remember reading about Peter Hall taking over the theatre in Stratford and calling the new company the RSC, and later that Peter O’Toole – who was appearing at Stratford – was to star in David Lean’s new film, Lawrence of Arabia. A film I saw four times the first week it came out.

Oh, happy days.