The Hillman Is Waiting

A third post about the Automobile Association. The first two are here and here. 

Detailed route maps were another service offered by the AA. You can still get them online, but in the 1960s they came in paper booklets setting out your route from beginning to end, junction-by-junction. This old example was on the internet. 

From around 1960, we began to hire cars for holidays. We went all over the country: Barmouth in Wales, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, Cromer in Norfolk, Kent, Devon. Finding your way was not then straightforward. It was before motorways, and you had to go through several large city centres. We always sent for an AA route map. Mum sat in the front seat turning the pages and reading the directions out loud. Sooner or later it ended up in confusion. 

In 1960, we headed for Christchurch, Dorset. “Where’s that?” Grandpa asked. “Near Southampton,” Dad told him. “You’ll never get there, son,” he said. He was almost right. We got hopelessly lost going round in circles in Leicester, despite the route map. “You are one of many,” said a bemused man sitting on his front garden wall watching the traffic.

The hire cars were always Hillmans from Glews Garage, then a Rootes Group dealer. The Hillman Minx was a lovely car, respectable and middle class. Dad liked them because they are mentioned in a poem by John Betjeman, which tells of a lifestyle we could never even hope to aspire to: “The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall, The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall”. But we could have a Hillman. 

So, it was no surprise when, in 1963, Dad collected a Hillman Super Minx from Glews as usual. I noticed almost straight away that it was brand new, but he did not let on immediately we had bought it. Mum had one of the biggest shocks of her life. 

I can’t work out where we went for that first trip; I think it was south. A few days later, I noticed one of the pedals was wet, and it turned out to be leaking clutch fluid. Directed by the AA Handbook, we soon found the nearest Rootes Group dealer who carried out a temporary repair until the master cylinder could be replaced at home 

Later that year we went to Aberdeen, and the following year to Inverness and Loch Ness. Here it the Super Minx (the blue one) at Jedburgh on the way to Scotland in 1964. Next to it is an earlier model, an ordinary Hillman Minx.

Dad was incredibly trusting with that car. When, a few years later, I learnt to drive, be let me borrow it on Saturdays for trips with friends to places such as Leeds and York. I will now admit to driving rather fast sometimes, but I never so much as even scratched it, although once or twice it was close. Perhaps he hoped I would so he could have a new one. It was becoming a bit of a rust bucket by then. 

Cars did not last long in those days, but the Hillman Avenger that later replaced it seemed cheap and tinny in comparison. The chap who bought the Super Minx kept it going for another 5 or 6 years. Dad gave up on Hillmans after that, and his next cars were a Triumph and a Morris. The Rootes Group was bought by Peugeot Talbot, and I stupidly bought a Samba, the worst car I ever had. 

Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill

This is not so much about railways, but about an area I knew well which a railway ran through.  

I was on the Rawcliffe bus with my mother, looking across the fields at a nearby metal bridge. It was a bright, sunny day, long before I started school. She would not yet have been 30. 

“Is that Boothferry Bridge?” I asked. 

“No, that’s the railway bridge.” 

A few minutes later I asked again. 

“Is that Boothferry Bridge?” 

“No, that’s the railway bridge.” 

I asked three or four times. A woman in the seat opposite looked at us and smiled.

The bridge carried the Goole to Selby railway line across the River Aire near Rawcliffe. It was a similar structure to Boothferry Bridge, but that is a road bridge across the River Ouse a couple of miles downstream. I had probably just learnt its name. 

On 21st May, I included this evocative picture of a rather ancient train arriving at Goole around 1960. More recently, I mentioned the Flanders and Swann song “The Slow Train”, which contains the line “No one departs and no one arrives, From Selby to Goole, from St. Erth to St. Ives.” 

It turns out that the train pictured is the very same Selby to Goole train. It travelled back and forth between the two towns for much of the day, and was sometimes called “the Goole and Selby Push and Pull” because it ran tender-first in one direction, so did not need to turn round. You can find pictures of the same engine and coaches at the Selby end. 

That railway holds some of my earliest memories. Although I travelled on the line only once, the bridge, the railway track, and the area nearby form a backdrop to my childhood. I passed often and always looked out for them. 

My one trip on the line was when, still very young, Dad took me to see the powerful East Coast Main Line locomotives that then passed through Selby. I suspect he wanted to see them more than I did. 

The Goole to Selby route was a single line track, about 10 miles long. I learnt the station names: Goole, Airmyn and Rawcliffe, Drax Hales, Barlow, and Selby. I remember being fascinated as Dad explained how the drivers had to possess a token to enter each section of track, and watching the tokens being handed over by the signalmen. Tokens were like large metal keys, with sturdy wire loops so they could be handed arm to arm, with minimal risk of drops. There was only one token for each length of track, which meant that successive trains had to travel in opposite directions. I think there were two sections of track, with a changeover point half way to allow trains to pass. The driver and signalman had to swap two tokens simultaneously without stopping, giving one and receiving one, not an easy procedure. When we went, trains were still steam hauled before diesel multiple units were brought in.

The line pretty much bisected Goole and Rawcliffe by Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill, where the road ran over the railway. It was a local landmark, the countryside being so flat. I passed at least once a week. 

I liked the big lorries that came over the hill through Rawcliffe from the West to call at the nearby Woodside Café. At times, there could be 20 from all over the country parked there. Even after the M62 was built, drivers made the short detour to call in. 

Mum liked to walk to the adjacent Bluebell Wood from which it took its name, to see and pick the abundant bluebells. We did not know better then. I remember going on another warm sunny day, also pre-school, past the distinctive Glews Garage, and the row of houses known as White City that were built for returning war veterans.

Airmyn and Rawcliffe station was next to the hill. For a time, Dad had a customer who lived in one of the station cottages. I liked to sit and wait for him when he took me to Grandma’s. “What a fantastic place to live,” I thought. Around the same time, my mother’s sister and her husband rented a smallholding nearby across the main road. I liked visiting there too. They had cows and chickens. 

This is Airmyn and Rawcliffe station in the early 1960s. The stations were all made of wood. 

Working late one Friday night in a thunderstorm in the dark, Dad arrived home very shaken. He had pulled up in his van behind a car that had stalled half way up Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill, and was immediately hit from behind by another van that had failed to stop in time. He eventually made it home with the rear of his van smashed in, its contents ruined, and a painful back. I think it was one of the reasons he decided to retire a year or two later.  

Even after the railway closed completely, Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill remained for many years, with a tricky bend in the middle and the empty track bed running underneath. I became quite skilled at drifting round the bend in my Mini Van without slowing down. Eventually, the road was levelled, but the local landmark remained beside the new section of road, still with a tricky bend, empty track bed, and silent and unused railway bridge across the fields. 

The Goole to Selby Line had only a short life; in fact, it has now been closed longer than it existed. It opened in 1910 and closed in 1964 as part of the Beeching cuts. It never attracted the expected goods traffic, and passenger numbers were low. 

This football special for Selby Town supporters travelling to a match against Goole during the 1950s was an exception. Those were the days when if you needed a longer train, you just got more coaches out of the carriage sidings. 

Much of the track has now been taken over by the A645 from Goole to Drax and Selby, which uses the railway bridge, and cuts about 8 miles off the previous route via Rawcliffe and Snaith. All that remains of the site of Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill is a roundabout. The station cottages are still there, but unrecognisable. Unless you know, you would never imagine there had ever been a station there or any railway at all. Glews Garage stood prominently just off the M62 for many years, with its name on the roof in large red lettering, but has now gone, and White City is no longer white. It is good to see the Woodside Café still in business beside the wood, but few lorries stop there now, and I suspect there are no more bluebells.  

I still look for all of them, though. 

Birthdays

October will soon be over, and we have put the clocks back. That should have brought two more birthdays because my brother (pictured) and I were both born in this month, but, tragically, he only made it to 36. Even his children have now lived longer, and I have been here over twice that, despite what the oncologists keep telling me. 

He would have been 70 this month. There was quite a gap between us. The explanation, according to my mum, was that she had a miscarriage two or three years after I was born. I don’t know whether it makes medical sense or not, or how she knew, but she said it was due to rhesus incompatibility. Mum had an uncommon blood group that sensitized her to mine, which caused future pregnancies of the wrong type to miscarry. 

My dad expanded the story many years later. It happened when we were on holiday in a caravan at Primrose Valley, Filey, on the Yorkshire coast. I don’t know how she dealt with the foetus, but she said she could tell it was a baby girl. I believe she spent a day resting in the caravan and then continued the holiday. No tests, no doctors, no hospitals. 

Patties

Tates Fish and Chip Shop in Rawcliffe High Street, 2000

I am trying to keep up with blogs and comments. It is becoming somewhat intermittent, but I am still here! 

Last week, Yorkshire Pudding mentioned patties, which are deep-fried battered potato cakes made and sold by fish and chip shops in East Yorkshire, but rarely else where. We had them in Goole, too, which was just over the river in the West Riding. He describes them as: 

“a staple option in most fish and chip shops in the East Riding of Yorkshire. I have never seen them for sale in Sheffield or Leeds. ... A patty is round - about 3.5 inches across and about 1.5 inches thick. It is made from mashed potato seasoned with sage and onion. Then it is dipped in a batter mixture before being deep-fried.” 

For me, it raised a question. A bit more about Georgina Pocklington’s family history is needed to explain. You may remember I wrote in an earlier posts that she had eight children with three different fathers, among them my grandma’s half-sister, Aunty Bina. 

Aunty Bina had ten children herself, i.e. my grandma’s half-cousins. She used to recite their names: 

“... there was Aunty Bina who had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert and Jack. ... They had fish and chip shops all over.”

You could say they had a fish and chip dynasty. It was founded by Aunty Bina’s husband, Tom Tate. Later, their youngest son Jack (born 1919) took it over, and my mother and other relatives helped in the shop when called upon. It still bears its name in Rawcliffe High Street, pictured in 2000. It has quite recently been renovated with a new white UPCV door and shop window, and a new sign in similar style, and has lost all its character. I don’t know whether it remains in the family. Jack Tate was known far and wide for the size of his fish. He used a Swan Vestas match box as a template.

I visited Jack around 2000, when working out that part of our family history. It was a privilege to see him. There were many he turned down. He remembered my mother helping in the shop. 

Many of Tom Tate’s children set up and helped each other open fish and chip shops themselves. So as well as Jack in Rawcliffe, there was one in Goole, one in Snaith, another in Retford, and, surprisingly, the eldest four children had shops in Rotherham. They were born in the 1890s, so had retired before 1970. We audited fish and chip shops when  I worked in accountancy, and you could see what good businesses they could be. 

[ADDED LATER] Tom Tate’s (junior) fish and chip shop in Rotherham is mentioned in Mike Marsh’s ‘Growing up in Goole, Volume 3’, although not by name. Mike Marsh was a childhood friend of Tom’s wife’s aunt, who arranged for them to stay with the Tates in Rotherham to see Donald Bradman and the Australian cricket team play Yorkshire at Sheffield in 1948. The Tates met them at Rotherham railway station, gave them unlimited fish and chips for tea, and took them to the theatre. After returning from Sheffield to Rotherham the following day, Brian’s “ever-generous uncle” bought them a real cricket bat and ball.

The ones in the Goole area certainly sold patties, but if there were once four fish and chip shops in Rotherham, with recipes originating in Rawcliffe, could you also once buy patties there, and can you still?

Uncle Owen

Last week, a man called Geoff came for a chat. He is a little older than me, and we had never previously met, but we have a kind of family link through my late Uncle Owen. 

Owen was my mother’s brother. He appears in my recent post showing the picture taken at the seaside around 1936, which mentions that he died in a military accident in his early twenties, while on National Service.  

One of many sad aspects is that he need not have been there. He was bamboozled into signing up for three years instead of the minimum two because, they said, it would be “good for his trade”. It was during the additional three years that he died. He was a plumber, and had just one year of his apprenticeship left to complete. He would nearly have finished but for that extra year. A plumber in the 1950s: what a lucrative trade that would have been! 

He was in the Air Force, and was hit by an aircraft shell that went off accidentally and exploded in the chest and abdomen. He stood no chance. Many years later, my father told me the injuries were so horrific, the coffin was sealed, and the only part of the body allowed to be seen was the head and face through a hatched window in the coffin lid. The funeral procession stretched beyond the end of the village High Street, and there was a military guard of honour and salute. I was only 3 at the time, but when older, I used to help my grandpa tend the grave. Last time I looked, the small gravestone was broken and collapsed. 

I can just remember him. He was well-known and popular, sang in the church choir (I have his prayer book), and played in the village cricket team. He had been married for 15 months to Aunty R. My grandparents had to intercept her as she returned home to Rawcliffe from work on the bus, to tell her about the awful telegram they had received. 

I liked Aunty R enormously. She was always smiling. She was a skilled invisible mender at the clothing factory. She and Owen had grown up next-door-but-two to each other, childhood sweethearts. They spent their wedding night at our house, while we stayed with my grandparents. 

One of the saddest photographs I have is of Aunty R with family members and friends three months after Owen died. She is in the centre of this picture wearing what we would then have called a costume (she is replaced by my mother in the second version). She puts on a brave face, but there is pain and sadness in her eyes. I am also in the picture, still aged under 4. Later, she came with us on holiday to Filey, and my grandparents took her with them to stay with friends in Scotland.

Aunty R remarried some years later, and moved to Huddersfield, near where we now live. I knew where she was, but did not want to revisit it while her husband was alive. About 5 years ago, after she was widowed a second time, I sent her some photographs, and she was very pleased to see them, and speak on the phone. She was then a surprisingly active 90-year-old, but died 2 years ago after falling.  

To return to Geoff, my visitor: he married Aunty R’s much younger sister. They also lived in the Huddersfield area, but I was not sure where. When I discovered it was only within two miles of me, R’s sister by then had early-onset dementia, and Geoff had cared for her full-time for many years. She died over a year ago. My last memory of her is of a little girl, about 3 years older than me, sitting in the sun on the front doorstep with her mother, eating a packet of potato crisps. There were over 6 blue wraps of salt in the bag. 

Geoff and I had an immediate rapport, with so many shared references and experiences, it was as if we had always known each other. We knew the same people who lived in the High Street where I spent every Saturday, and he was at school with my mother’s second cousin who helped me work out that part of our family tree. He could talk about the village social life, and who was related to whom. 

It wa’n’t long afoo-ere we’wer’ in West Riding Rawcliffe talk.  

I mentioned Uncle Owen was a plumber, and that I remembered him and my grandpa building an outside lavatory in the back yard. Before that, I said, they had an earth closet and an ash midden. You shovelled the lavatory contents through to the ash midden, a brick building with no roof, to be burnt with the household rubbish. Periodically, council workers shovelled the ash midden contents into bins by hand, and carried it to a lorry. He knew exactly what I was talking about. 

“If you don’t pay attention at school”, my mother used to say, “you’ll end up working on t’shit carts”.  

That really got Geoff going: things I’ve mentioned before. “It was so primitive,” he said. “Boiler on first thing Monday morning heating water, then all day washing with a dolly tub and peggy stick, and wringing it out with a hand wringer. Then using the leftover hot water to fill the tin bath, which hung in the yard for the rest of the week, and taking turns in the bath with the same water. Tuesdays were spent drying the heavy wet washing with wooden clothes props over a washing line, and Wednesdays ironing. Unbelievable!” he said. “It was little more than 60 years ago, yet when you tell ’em about the shit carts, they think you are talking about the dark ages.”

He knows I am ill and cannot easily get out now, but said he would like to call again. It would be good if he did.  

As for Uncle Owen, he should have been busy installing indoor upstairs bathrooms, kitchen plumbing, and central heating systems. He could have had his own business, and his younger brother could have served an apprenticeship with him. Who knows, I might even have been a plumber myself. I would have had more cousins, and everything would have been different. 

The Restless Friend

New Month Old Post: first posted 22nd January, 2017

From Great Heck and the Norfolk Broads to Southern Rhodesia: the contrasting lives of childhood friends.

High on the mantelpiece in the back room of the house where I grew up, were photographs of my mother and father taking turns to wear a ships’ officer’s hat at the wheel of a houseboat on the Norfolk Broads. My dad’s pipe is jauntily raked at an angle that would not have been out of place in someone commanding a much larger vessel. He puts on a show of self-importance while my mum looks relaxed and happy. How young and carefree they seem; from a time before I was born. 

My dad remembered this post-war holiday fifty years later. They went with his school friend Freddy and wife Sylvia. My mum, Freddy and Sylvia went on ahead because Dad had to work the first Saturday. He took his suitcase in the firm’s van and was dropped off at Heck railway station, between Selby and Doncaster, where he took a direct train to Norwich. He remembered the splendid sight of Ely Cathedral in the evening sun. He was young, the war was over and he was off on holiday with his new wife and friends: for all of them the future was rosy. 

You might be surprised to learn there was ever a direct train from Heck to Norwich, but during the war the tiny station at Great Heck gained unusual importance due to its proximity to No. 51 Heavy Bomber Squadron, R.A.F. Snaith, a short distance along a country lane between Heck and nearby Pollington. Also at Pollington were army barracks and one of the largest Women’s Land Army quarters in the country. Some 3,200 extra personnel were drafted into a village of 650. My dad’s train was a residual wartime service. He actually caught it on the very last Saturday it ran.

Great Heck has no railway station at all now. It disappeared around nineteen-sixty along with its neighbours at Temple Hirst, Balne and Moss. My dad once took me there in the nineteen-fifties to watch powerful Atlantic and Pacific locomotives race through non-stop on the East Coast Main Line between York and Doncaster. By then the station had already declined into obscurity and might never have been heard of again had it not been the site of the terrible Great Heck rail crash in February, 2001. Even that is often referred to as the Selby rail crash.

Pollington Airfield has also gone. A few derelict hangars remain but the runways and taxiways have all but crumbled and the site is used now by haulage and storage companies. For much of the nineteen-sixties and -seventies it was a popular off-road spot for learner drivers to make their first juddering attempts at starting, steering, stopping and changing gear.

Back in the photographs, it is Freddy’s cap they are wearing. On leaving school he had initially begun to train as a ship’s officer, but wartime on the ominous North Atlantic convoys had left him restless. He exchanged his sextant for the cricket team and a job in a railway office. The drudgery was too much. While my dad remained in his small Yorkshire town, Freddy left for the champagne air of colonial Southern Rhodesia, seeking excitement and adventure over caution and insularity. Sylvia followed soon after with their two young children. That is what wives did in those days whether or not they really wanted to. 

They left in 1952 and lived very comfortably for a time. Whites in Rhodesia had servants, sizeable houses with pleasant gardens and swimming pools, and good health care and education. The climate was wonderful and it was one of the richest communities in the world. I don’t know whether Freddy ever came back. Online ships’ manifests only show Sylvia and the children spending five months in Yorkshire without Freddy in 1955, but the records are incomplete.

What I do remember is that each Christmas Freddy sent my dad a subscription to the Reader’s Digest. My dad thought it the affected urbanity of a smug high-flier and was irritated by the complacent, patronising content. But children have time to read such things: the features such as ‘Laughter the Best Medicine’, ‘Humour in Uniform’, ‘Life’s Like That’ and ‘Test Your Word Power’, the biographies and articles on technology and medicine, the condensed books. I still, for old time’s sake, go straight to the piles of back-issues in holiday cottages and waiting rooms. Thankfully my word power fairs better now. It is easy to see why it was once one of the highest-circulation periodicals in the world, despite all the junk mail that comes with it.

The gift subscription continued into the nineteen-sixties despite nothing ever being sent back in return, not even a Christmas card, as we did not know Freddy’s address. It may have been in Bulawayo. One year the subscription stopped. Perhaps he had decided not to bother any more. We gradually forgot about it. It was a long time before we heard what had happened.

Two decades later, Sylvia unexpectedly returned to England, alone and penniless. It transpired that Freddy, clever with money, had made a small fortune on the stock market, but had also developed an alcohol problem. Eventually, he left and moved to Hong-Kong where he later died. Sylvia had remained in Rhodesia (by then Zimbabwe) until, forced by the economic and political situation there, she returned to Yorkshire. She had not been allowed to bring any money out of the country. She came back to be near her daughter, but her daughter died fairly soon afterwards. Sylvia spent the rest of her days in our small Yorkshire town on benefits in a bedsit, surrounded by second-hand furniture. She was too proud to accept offers of help, even though my parents, who had not moved away, had become fairly comfortably off. 

I guess, as these events are long past and the people long gone, it is all right to post these pictures of Freddy and Sylvia (one with my dad). 

Class Journey

When I describe myself as working class, it irritates my wife and family no end. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” they say. “You had professional jobs in accountancy, computing, and universities. Your father employed fifteen people, and owned a four-bedroomed detached house with a double garage and garden in a nice part of town. He had a good car. You had books and music at home. How can that be working class?” 

I protest that much of that came later, but they won’t have it and excited voices are raised. They don’t like the idea that if I am working class, it might make them working class too. 

“I would not have married you if you had been working class,” my wife once said. 

No, we are not working class now. The kids were embarrassed at school to be called “posh” because they did not have particularly strong local accents. But I grew up working class. 

Like many of my age and background, especially from the North of England, I have been on a kind of class journey, and changed. It was not a deliberate or conscious change, but without it, I would not have been able to do the things I did. Class was, and to a large extent remains, a big influence on opportunity in England today. We make scores of micro-judgements about each other’s backgrounds all the time, and treat each other accordingly. It influences whether or not we are offered a particular job or promotion, or who we select as friends or partners. 

The street where we lived until I was 6, although it seemed shabbier then

It is largely the circumstances of your childhood that define you: how you lived and the friends you had. We lived in a rented two-bedroomed terraced house until I was six, and then moved up in the world to a three-bedroomed semi. My dad worked as part shot assistant, and part salesman travelling around the local villages three days a week. Some days he was not home until seven or eight. On Thursday mornings (half-day closing) he went to work in a boiler suit to clean and maintain the firm’s four vehicles, which took a lot of time in the forties and fifties. He worked on Saturdays and had only two week’s holiday a year. 

Like many ‘housewives’, my mother did not work. Ordinary jobs paid enough to bring up a family quite comfortably on one income in those days. Work was social, without the intensity it can now have. 

We then lived in one of the semi-detached houses on the left until I was 18

It might be more accurate to say we were well-brought-up working class. We did not rent a council house, and my dad was not a manual worker. He took over the business when I was 12, but we did not move to the larger house until a few months before I left school. I never really lived there. I moved on to shared houses in Leeds with ordinary lads from ordinary parts of Wakefield and Manchester. 

Let me list how the fathers of my schoolday friends earned their livings: dock worker, railway labourer, engine driver, joiner, council lorry driver, gas meter reader, clothing factory worker, scaffolder, stone mason. They were the children I mixed and played with, and was influenced by. Many lived in council or rented housing. A little above were a butcher with his own shop, a chiropodist, an electricity board clerk, and a man who selected ships’ crew, but it was a working class area in a northern working class town. We used local pronunciations such as “watter” (water), “owt” and “mowt” (anything and nothing), “whee-ere” and “thee-ere” (where and there), and “moo-ere” (more). I knew the difference, but did not mix with any children from professional families except, in my late teens, one whose parents were teachers. Some years later, I felt perfectly at home working in a canning factory. 

A few years ago, I came across an old cassette tape recorded at a friend’s house when I was around 17. We switched on the recorder and let it run: five of us I think. The accents, the bad language, how we spoke about girls at school: you would be in no doubt that we were uncouth working class. It made me so uncomfortable I threw the tape away. 

We moved to a large house in this (then) leafy part of town when I was 18

Although I soon moved to shared houses in Leeds.
The first was a wrong-way-round house, with entrance at what was built as the rear.
The front entrance was only on foot.

But I am speaking about the economic working class. There are other indicators. Culturally, we were not typical. My dad had educated interests. He read a lot, listened to the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), and liked poetry. He was a churchgoer, and followed up the monthly Bible Readings they sent. We had encyclopaedias and books, and my dad talked to me about them, and I read them. He involved me in his Thursday jobs around the house, such as maintaining bicycles and cleaning boots, and interested me in things around town such as ships in the docks, the railways, and the shipyard. I had hobbies and used the public library a lot. I had good general knowledge. 

Mum also read a lot, and was in a drama group. Although she was clever, and could have gone to the Grammar School, she chose to stay at her village school and left at fourteen. She helped in her mother’s grocery shop until she married, where they provided tea (i.e. an evening meal) for my father’s travellers out late on their rounds. 

I think this background helped get me into the Grammar School where I had a good education and intelligent friends. The Grammar Schools were created to supply the country’s need for educated professionals: social engineering on a grand scale. It took me into the accountancy profession, and contact with privately educated colleagues and business owners. We had to get on with everyone from office and factory workers to the rich. My accent began to shift, my language became more elaborate, and I began to understand how the world worked. 

Going late to university and working in higher education around the country brought further sophistications. My accent still reveals my Yorkshire roots, and some even detect which part of Yorkshire, but it is unsettling to encounter those who never moved away, and realise just how different I am now. They often sound uneducated. 

Do genetics influence class? How did my great-grandfather lift himself from a background of agricultural labourers to become a ship’s master after running away to sea? And my grandfather successfully started his own business, and employed others. Another great-grandfather was active in the Methodist church, with wide religious knowledge. My mother’s father worked in a paper mill, but his family had (and still has) an almost innate understanding of all things mechanicals. They can mend almost anything. These things run through families for generations, although the genetic elements no doubt interact with other factors in complex ways. 

Perhaps class differences are no longer what they were, but they are still there in the background. It shows in what you do, your interests, how you spend your time, your friends, the language you use, how much wealth you have, and many other things. The private education sector perpetuates class differences by handing more opportunities to those whose families have paid the enormous fees. I don’t want to make “chip-on-the-shoulder” excuses, but my culturally rich family background is nothing compared to the advantages some have. 

I did all right in the end, and it has been mainly down to merit. Some academic achievements cannot be bought. I hope that is not being smug. Although selection was not entirely unbiased, I regret the abolition of the state Grammar Schools and the social mobility they gave to so many from ordinary backgrounds like mine. 

My Picture Book of Ships

New Month Old Post: first posted 25th July, 2016

On the bottom shelf of my dad’s bookcase were some of his childhood books. He was nearly as daft as me for keeping things. There might have been many more treasures but for mum’s propensity for throwing things away, although the bookcase was sacrosanct, even to her.

I always knew he had them, of course, but never took the time for anything more than a superficial glance at the pictures. He must have treasured them greatly. All have his name and address inside and some also the date.

The earliest and most dilapidated is My Picture Book of Ships which he got in 1926 at the age of five. To a child at that time the cover must have looked thrilling: the vast bulk of the ocean liner soaring proud above the waterline, the towering hull and funnels, the dense spray from the bow-wave hinting at the rumbling power of the great engines and propellers, the huge anchor tight against the ship’s side. People yearned to travel in the luxury of these floating palaces. They were the dream machines of their day: the supersonic jets, the Lamborghinis, the spaceliners, the high speed trains, the earth moving machines, the ice road truckers. Even their names implied substance and opulence: Majestic, Britannic, Olympic, Leviathan, Edinburgh Castle.  

We used to look at it together when I was little. We studied the sixty-two illustrations but never read it. The text tells of two children, Tom and Betty, who ceaselessly ask Father questions about ships. They also play at ships: Tom is Captain and Father the pilot, while Chief Officer Mother sleeps “on watch” below and poor Petty Officer Betty gets ordered around.

Father of course answers all their questions patiently, knowledgeably, and at length. He tells them about how the voyage of an ocean liner is organized, how sailors are trained, shipbuilding, shipwrecks, coal and oil power, sail, cargo vessels, lifeboats, lighthouses and lightships, paddle steamers, and ferries. How he knew all this stuff is not clear. He just did. Perhaps he was a seaman himself, or maybe like my own dad his grandfather had been a Captain and his cousin was at sea. Oh yes, all dads knew everything there was to know about ships; especially when they had grown up in a Yorkshire port.

Dads could describe and explain all the pictures: cargo being unloaded at London docks, the Harwich-Zeebrugge railway ferry with wagons on board, a big ship under construction inside a massive gantry, and boys lining a high mast at a sailors’ training school. I certainly would not have wanted to have been the baby thrown through the air to a lifeboat in a rescue at sea. My dad used to pick me up and pretend to act it out.

But that is not what used to frighten me most. I was terrified of the strange double-page cartoons inside the front and back covers. Why a factual book about ships should contain such irreverent drawings is a mystery. They are not even proper ships. They show traumatised people in canoes, punts and rowing boats on an overcrowded river, being attacked by pigs, cows and swans, knocked overboard by clumsy oarsmen or tormented by badly controlled fishing lines. They all have ugly ears, gaping mouths and grotesque faces. I could never bear to look. It is still difficult now.

As Nick Ross used to say: “Don’t have nightmares. Do sleep well.”

My Picture Book of Ships published by Ward Lock & Co. (c1922) is believed to be out of copyright.

Haunted Houses

New Month Old Post: first posted 1st March, 2016
It could do with being shorter. Since originally posted, the 1921 Census has become available

The 1939 Register
 
Somewhat obsessively, I have been an active researcher of my family history for over twenty years now, buying countless genealogical resources and subscriptions. Along the way have been some surprising and even astonishing findings, as well as many mundane, but in February when the findmypast site released a new resource, The 1939 Register, I experienced an entirely new reaction.

Rather like a census, The 1939 Register records the names and addresses of everyone living in England and Wales on the 29th September, 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. It did not go into as much detail as a normal census, but was carried out in a similar way for wartime purposes: to issue national identification and ration cards, to administer conscription, and to plan population movements in the event of mass evacuation. It was later used by the National Health Service at its inception in 1948. As no census was taken in 1941, and as the records for the 1931 census were destroyed by fire during the war, the Register is the most complete survey of the population between the as yet unreleased censuses of 1921 and 1951.

What makes it different for me is that, as a snapshot taken just over a decade before I was born, The 1939 Register is almost contemporary. Other population surveys such as the 1911 census were from so long ago that just about everything has since changed, which will also be true of the 1921 census when they finally let us see it, but much of the information recorded in The 1939 Register remained unchanged into the nineteen-fifties. Many of the same people were at the same addresses as I remember them. If my parents were still around they would be fascinated.

I can see the two-bedroom terraced house my parents rented from 1946, where I first lived. It is occupied by a canal tugman and his family. They had brought up six children there. Wherever did they put them all? 

The people next door are the same as I remember, as are those at the corner shop next-door-but-one. Across the road is the same gentlemen’s hairdresser, then newly married. He would remain there with his wife, childless, for the next thirty years. It was where I used to be sent for my hair cut – short back and sides the only style on offer – every three or four weeks throughout the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. Once old enough to go unaccompanied, I would wait my turn in the smoky den of his barber’s shop (it would never have been called anything so epicene as a salon) trying to make sense of the swaggering conceits of the older customers. From time to time the hairdresser’s timid wife would materialise at the through-door from the house to leave a cup of tea, and then dematerialise as silently as she had arrived. 

In the mid nineteen-fifties we moved to a new address, up in the world to a small semi-detached house. The 1939 Register shows it occupied by the shipwright’s family we bought it from. The adjoining neighbours were still there when we moved in, father, mother and grown-up children. The mother and father would die in the nineteen-sixties but one of their daughters would remain in the house, unmarried, for the next sixty years. The neighbours at the other side are a young widow still in her thirties and her elderly mother. They too were still there when we moved in. The mother died soon afterwards, but the widow remained long after we had left until she died at an advanced age in the nineteen-nineties. She became a close family friend. Up and down the street are so many other familiar names: the master mariner; the butcher; the mother and her daughter who in turn became the mother of the boys we played with when they visited their grandma. 

The Register is more flexibly searchable than almost any previous resource. Whereas the censuses, for example, can be trawled only in limited ways, The 1939 Register search is so powerful you can find almost anyone, even when they are partially mistranscribed in the index. The main limitation is that you are not supposed to be able to see anyone born less than a hundred years ago, although often you can. In most households, such as my father’s parents’, the children are blacked out, and only the names of the adults are shown. But despite being born in the nineteen-twenties, my mother can be seen with her parents, her name amended after marriage, a result of parts of the Register continuing in use with the National Health Service until 1991, after she had died.

You can find just about any house built before 1939. In Leeds, I can see the elderly couple I lodged with in 1970 at the same Kirkstall address in 1939, although then they are not elderly. The husband is a railway clerk. The address also has one ‘closed’ line for their daughter who would later marry a corporation surveyor and have one son. At other places I lived, much later in some cases, the 1939 residents had moved on long before my time. One through-terrace is occupied by an engineer’s turner and his wife, both born in the eighteen-seventies. Another is occupied by a wool foreman with his wife and four children. The only back-to-back I lived in is the home of a shoe repairer and his wife, both in their mid-twenties. At yet another mid-terrace there are nine residents: a couple born in the eighteen-seventies and seven grown-up children. The father and one of the sons are asphalters. Again, how did they fit them all in?

Some houses I have known were larger. In the Levenshulme area of Manchester, in the early nineteen-eighties, I lived in a three-bedroom, bay-windowed terrace with front and back gardens. Next door lived a widow who in 1939 is there with her husband and mother-in-law. The husband, the neighbours and the occupants of my address have mainly clerical occupations. I still have some of the next door neighbour’s late husband’s drill bits and an ancient tobacco tin full of wire staples which she gave me when clearing out her shed. The hardware was probably there in 1939 but the Register lists only people. I lived in yet grander surroundings in the Avenues area of Hull. In my day they were already what are now called HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) but in 1939 they were occupied by the likes of Ministers of Religion, newspaper reporters, merchants, lecturers, collectors of taxes and people of private means. 

Like having the gift of premonition, if you are near my age or older, you look through The 1939 Register and find you knew or can remember so many of those named in it. You know what happened to them, who they married, who their children were, and when they died, or at the very least, what became of their houses. Do they return as ghosts to light their coal fires in the mornings, the husbands going off to work and the children to school as they must have done so many times? Do the wives cook and clean for their return? Do they relive their happy days, sad days, sunny days, rainy days, Easters, Christmases, an holidays? Will we?

Fixing A Hole

New Month Old Post: first posted 7th February, 2015. A rather contrived piece about how the Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ accompanied my DIY jobs through the years. This piece was published in The Guardian newspaper (second item on the page linked here).

Fixing a Hole by the Beatles 

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in /
And stops my mind from wandering / 
Where it will go”

1968: A-level examinations year. We moved house and I was allowed to decorate my new bedroom as I wanted, and listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my reel-to-reel tape recorder I covered the flowery wallpaper a responsible dark blue and irresponsibly failed my A-levels. I’m not sure which my mum thought worse, the room colour or the exam results, but after I left for an office job in Leeds, the flowery wallpaper returned.

1970: “Painting the room in a colourful way.”
 
To the tape of Sgt. Pepper, I painted the walls of my rented room an adventurous orange and unadventurously stayed for seven years, ignoring my mum’s frequent hints about the dreadful colour.

1978: A mature student in Hull. With Sgt. Pepper loud in stereo through my Akai tape deck, Leak amplifier and massive Wharfedale speakers, I emulsioned the room an impulsive dark red and unimpulsively got a first, despite living with such a dismal colour my mum said.

1990: “Filling the cracks that ran through the door”

In a good career in Nottingham, I at last meet someone who appreciates my interior design skills. I moved in with my old stereo and tape of Sgt. Pepper and mended the doors and window frames. I like to think my mum would have been impressed too but sadly by then it was too late. We sold the house and moved back to Yorkshire.

1993: Sgt. Pepper is now on a cheap cassette player as we paper our bedroom ceiling using the two chairs relay method. Standing one behind the other, the person nearest the wall sticks one end of the pasted wallpaper to the ceiling and the person behind sticks the next bit. The first person then moves with chair behind the second, and sticks up some more, and so on, right across the room. We both end up slippery and sticky, with more paste on us than on the paper, which slowly detaches itself and drops down.

2015: “Taking my time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.”

I only hear music in the car these days. Sgt. Pepper comes on and reminds me that now the kids are grown up we need to re-paper the bedroom ceiling which has cracked under the weight of all their junk – and mine – up in the loft. I wonder if the tape deck, amplifier and speakers still work?

Akai 4000 DS Tape Deck, Leak 3200 Tuner Amplifier and Wharfedale Glendale Speakers

Housewives’ Choice

This is where I lived until the age of 6. It seems unchanged except for replacement doors and windows, and the back bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom. That attic is where I played with my dad. 

The front door opened on to a passage past the front room and stairs, to the back room, with a single-storey kitchen behind. There was an outside toilet behind the kitchen, and we hung a paraffin lamp under the cistern to stop it freezing in winter. There was blue paraffin and pink paraffin, just different brands I think. They had the same distinctive smell, both liquid and alight. 

For hot water we had a gas ‘geyser’. It had blue flames underneath when in operation. For large quantities to fill the bath and laundry dolly tub we heated it on the gas cooker, or lit a fire in an outhouse (the “wash house”) at the end of the garden. A bit later we did get a stand-alone Ada washing machine with a wringer on top and a hose that hooked over the kitchen sink. 

Here we are at the back of the house, ‘tin’ bath against the wall. With no indoor bathroom or toilet you needed a ‘po’ under the bed. The music of the tinkling deepened with the content, especially with enamel metal ones, although I guess they were warmer than porcelain for women to sit on. Did couples have one each, or share? If that sounds primitive, my grandma still used an earth closet. ‘Pos’ were also useful in freezing weather. It was all very well for men; they could wee in the kitchen sink over the dirty dishes. Now we want en-suite bathrooms and a shower every day. 

Before I was old enough for school, I was at home with my mum. Dad went off to work, and Mum began clearing up the breakfast table and doing things in the kitchen (and of course emptying the ‘pos’). I would play on the back room floor. After starting school, the same routine continued during holidays, and after my brother was born and we moved to another house with the luxury of an indoor bathroom. 

At 10 past 9 each weekday, Housewives’ Choice came on the ‘wireless’ as we then called it. It played popular songs. I soaked them in. Before I was 10, I could sing the tunes and at least the first verse of possibly 100 contemporary popular songs. That does not include the older songs my dad sang, traditional tunes, or hymns and carols.  

Last month’s post about uncool singers had me wondering how many I still know. Over the following days they came tumbling out of my head until I was begging them to stop. Here are some I can still make a decent attempt at. I tend to remember the tunes, but not always the words or singers. 

For a start, there was the Housewives’ Choice signature tune. I can also do Workers’ Playtime, Two Way Family Favourites, and Children’s Favourites. Or how about the music Granada Television (then the commercial channel for the whole of the North of England) played before starting up at five o’clock? 

The earliest contemporary song I remember is The Ugly Duckling by Danny Kaye (1952). Danny Kaye also sang Wonderful Copenhagen (1953). I doubt my memories are from those years because I was very young, and they were played incessantly later. 

Also from 1953 is She Wears Red Feathers (Guy Mitchell). He also did Singing The Blues (1957) but I suspect it is the slurred and affected Tommy Steele U.K. version I remember. An older boy copied it as he rode his bicycle along the street. Tommy Steele also sang Little White Bull (1959). 

I mentioned Memories Are Made Of This (Dean Martin, 1955) and Magic Moments (Perry Como, 1958) in last month’s post. Perry Como also sang Catch A Falling Star (1957) and Delaware (1959). I am pretty sure I remember them from that time and still know most of the words. 

Alma Cogan was hugely popular in Britain in the 1950s. I can still do Where Will the Dimple Be, Twenty Tiny Fingers and Sugartime (all 1955) which are fairly awful. But I seem to recall her recording of the brilliant Love and Marriage (1956) being played a lot, even though it was Frank Sinatra that had the hit. Illusion; conclusion; institute; disparage: good for the vocabulary, too. 

Another awful song was Pickin’ a Chicken (Eve Boswell, 1955). Sadly I still know it.

Michael Holiday had a wonderfully rich voice, but died tragically young. I knew The Story Of My Life (1958) all the way through. Is that why I write what I write?  

The Beverley Sisters were also very popular. As well as Sisters (1954), they were well known for Little Donkey and Little Drummer Boy (1959). 

My mother liked to point out that David Whitfield was from Hull whenever he came on, but I could not bring to mind anything he sang. I am surprised to read he sang the theme tune for the TV series, The Adventures of William Tell (1958). Ronnie Hilton was also from Hull.

That’s over 20. There were so many more. This is the personal compilation of a child of the 50s. I had to stop somewhere. It was becoming painful. I can still sing them all. I made the list from memory and looked up other details later. Some were covers of American songs by British singers, and some the silly kind of songs that appeal to children. Commercial compilations of 1950s hits are very different. 

When older, I had a transistor radio. I listened to 208 Radio Luxembourg at night under the bedclothes (Radio Luxembourg circumvented the BBC monopoly and ban on advertising). One night there was a request for ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles. I’d never heard anything like it. It stuck fast in my head, and music changed for ever. Parents thought it rubbish, not that it troubled them much. It would be some years before you would hear it on Housewives’ Choice. 

Farmwashing

I have a pre-school memory of going into town with Mum to do the shopping. She stacked it on and around me in the pushchair. 

In those days you had to shop for fresh food two or three times a week. No fridges for us until the 1960s. Meat kept only for so long in a mesh-fronted meat safe. Milk was delivered daily to the door. You had to buy from different shops: the grocer, the butcher, the greengrocer, and others. Nearly all produce was locally grown and in season. Life was simpler and less frantic. Most mothers did not work, and one ordinary wage could support a family. 

Now, of course, you can buy anything you want at any time of the year: fresh peas and new potatoes in Winter, strawberries at Christmas, and oranges at other times. You never saw blueberries at all. It is flown in cheaply from all over the world. 

Perhaps we expect too much. The toll on the environment is enormous, therefore many prefer to spend a little more and buy locally-grown, ethically-produced meat, fruit, and vegetables. To meet this need, supermarkets offer special brands with idyllic-sounding farm names on the front of the packet. It implies that the product is from those farms. 

This is deliberately misleading. Behind the image of quaint British family farms usually lies a reality of industrial-scale production, with much imported from abroad. Three of the biggest producers have a combined annual turnover of £4.8 billion. The ‘farm’ on the label, such as Tesco’s Redmere Farms, does not exist. It is just a marketing device. At the same time, the real farms this imitates are being driven out of business as their own products are devalued. Large numbers of small farmers fear having to give up their farms, and few believe that supermarket claims to support British farming reflect their actual behaviour.

This is in effect theft, stealing the goodwill of the small farmers. Such cynical manipulation of customers and consumers by big businesses of all kinds (we can probably think of others), with the pursuit of profit above all sense of morality, needs to stop. I can get very angry about it.  

We buy some of our own vegetables from Riverford who have created a website and four short videos with more about Farmwashing. You will never look at a supermarket vegetable aisle in the same way again. 

The website and videos are at www.stopfarmwashing.co.uk and also on YouTube:  

The Carnival Is Over

Yorkshire Square Eight

My last post created some nostalgia for village community life, now remembered only vaguely. Little remained beyond the nineteen-fifties. Much of what we know is second-hand. 

I could have said so much more. Pre-television, pre-car-ownership, pre-eating out, pre-foreign holidays, people created their own entertainment. There were dances, a drama group, a music and opera society, and sports teams. 

I remember the annual fairs on the village green, which my grandma oddly called the village “Fe-ast”, when parts of larger fairs stopped off on their travels around the country, possibly on the way to Hull Fair. The loud piping of fairground organs, the ring of slot machines, the smell of saucy hot dogs, the colour and blur of the rides, the force of bumping cars (dodgems), swings, roundabouts, rifles with rigged sights, brightly coloured wooden ducks swirling through torrents of water, excited voices, all above the hum of diesel generators, still take me back there, to the age of six or seven. 

Then there were the village carnivals, maybe not every year, fading away by my day. So much time, energy, organisation and creativity went into them. There was real talent in the village. The costumes were particularly impressive. 

The 1937 carnival programme named more than 150 participants, mainly children. Proceedings opened with a procession of Heralds, The Lord Chamberlain, the Crown bearer, Standard bearers and Pages, and the crowning of the May Queen. The Queen was presented with a bouquet, and her Courtiers and Maids of Honour received representatives of Britannia, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Peace. 

The main proceedings consisted of children’s dances. There was a Yorkshire Square Eight, Butterfly dancers, Milkmaids and Boy Blues, Spring Flower dancers, a nursery rhyme medley, Indians and Palefaces, Fairies and Elves, Sailors hornpipe and signals, and Jockeys. There were two maypole dances, the first creating a single plait and gypsy tent, the second a double plait, spider’s web and barber’s pole. Later there were larger group dances: a Circassian Circle and a “Mage on a Cree”. The day ended with a march led by the Queen, her Court and a band of toy soldiers. No doubt there were other adult activities well into the evening. I don’t have the pages naming the organisers. Nor do I know how the music was provided, or who designed and made the costumes. 

The programme lists the names of my mother, her brother and sister, and many of her “cousins” and friends. She danced in the Yorkshire Square Eight (above, top row, left). Her cousin, Jean, is in front of her. Jean would later lose a son in an awful railway accident. Another cousin, Alfie, is third from the right on the top row. Her friend, Kitty, is fourth from the right on the bottom row. I went with my mother to watch the Coronation on their television. 

Mother’s brother was an elf (below, top row, third from left). Her sister was a milkmaid (second picture below, top row, fourth from left). Her sister was the only one of four siblings to live to a good age. Other cousins and relatives appear in these pictures, too. 

Fairies and Elves

Milkmaids and Boy Blues

What does any of it matter now? The kids aren’t bothered. And those earlier children were soon to be shaken from their idyll, violently thrown into today’s world of conflict and events in far away lands. My uncle, the little boy in the elf outfit, died overseas on National Service in a tragic air force accident at only twenty-three. I can just remember him. He was clever; a plumber. He would have done well in the building boom. His widow, astonished that after sixty-five years without contact I still called her “Aunty R”, told me how she had arrived back on the bus from work to be told the awful news by my grandfather. My poor grandfather, who had lost all his own siblings when young, and now a son. And his own father would have told him how he was only one of two out of eleven to live beyond their thirties, their names and dates recorded carefully in the family bible. It was all so long ago. It’s just nostalgia.  

The Village

Village Dance Class, 1930s.
My mother (top, 3rd from right) is one of four “cousins” in the picture.
She would have been 100 years old today.

“It was a lovely place to grow up”, said Aunty Olga the last time we spoke. “The best anyone could want”. She talked of a High Street with no motor vehicles to stop you playing in the road, all the relations living nearby, and how everyone knew each other and were friends. There were shops with all you could want, and clubs and groups and things to do. The buses ran late so you could get back from the pictures in town. “Not like now”. 

“Aunty” Olga. We called them all “Aunty” or “Uncle", or if they were the same age as us “cousins”, no matter whether they were really great aunts, great uncles, second cousins, half-cousins, cousins once removed, or some other combination. It was simpler. There were loads of them. “Your mother was more of a sister than a cousin to me”, Aunty Olga said. 

I caught it right at the end, and don’t doubt her. I fetched milk from the farm dairy and talked to the pig in the butcher’s sty. I bought pop from the sweet shop, chips from the fish shop, rolls of gun caps for my cowboy pistol and foreign stamps for my collection near The Green. I marvelled at the old village water pump near the church and walked on my own the three-quarters of a mile along the river bank to my aunt’s smallholding at the ferry houses. I knew the local names that appeared on few maps: Gander’ill; Cock’orner; Cuckoo Park. 

A walk down the High Street with my grandma meant talking to everyone we passed. 

“Who was that?”  
“My cousin.”  
“And who was that?” 
“He’s my cousin too.” 

“How many cousins have you got?” 

I’d wish I’d not asked. 

“Well, there was Aunty Bina who had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert and Jack. She brought up our Jean as well, although her mother was really Ena. They had fish and chip shops all over.”

“Then there was Aunty Annie who married Uncle George, and had Mary, Fred, and Bessie.” She pointed to ‘M, F, and B’, scratched long ago into the bricks of number 88 (still visible today). 

“Do you mean Aunty Mary?” I asked. Aunty Mary had the prettiest face I’d ever seen. 

If Grandma was in the mood, she would go on to list the millions of children of uncles Fred, Bill and Horner, who had moved away to run a paper mill in Lancashire.  

All were prefixed “our”: our Fred, our Bessie, and our Mary. Aunty Olga’s children were our Linda, our Sandra, and our Gillian. It distinguished them from Aunts and Uncles who were not relatives at all, such as Aunty Annie ’agyard (3 syllables). What funny names some had. 

And that was only one of Grandma’s sides. The other was worse. 

Even more confusing, my mother’s Great Aunty Bina was married to my dad’s grandpa’s cousin, which meant I was doubly related to Blanche, Tom, Gladys, and the rest. 

I heard it so often I could recite it to my wife decades later: “Blanche, Gladys, Ena, Lena, Gina, Dolly, Molly, Mary, Bessie, Ella, Olga, Linda...”

“They sound like a herd of Uncle Bill’s cows,” she said. 

Uncle Bill (don’t ask), was from across the river and had married into the family. He said that if the Blue Line bus had not started running through the village, they would have all been imbeciles because of inbreeding. 

I went less and less as I grew into my teens, not realising it was coming to an end. It would never be the same again.  

Follow The Moon

A few weeks ago, Jabblog wrote a post about Lyle’s Golden Syrup, which, by the ways and wanders of the mind in the night, took me to a party game. 

I was about six or seven, and it was my birthday. Mum invited a few friends round. I fancy there was Dennis and Johnny from the next street, maybe Jack the neat writer, and Geoffrey Bullard, not yet the monster he became. Girls? I don’t know. Maybe my second-cousin, Linda, and her funny friend, Margaret. I liked them. We were all in the same class at school. I can’t really remember. The more you try, the more you make up. 

I imagine we ran around in the garden for a while, and had tea. It would have been treacle on bread or treacle sandwiches (our name for Lyle’s Golden Syrup), or possibly honey. We often had that for our tea. Some people used to have condensed milk sandwiches, but I never liked the way it soaked into the bread and seeped out at the edges. For pudding, it would have been Rowntree’s Jelly and tinned fruit, with Carnation cream (which is what we called evaporated milk).  And fizzy Tizer or Vimto to drink. Such was the nineteen-fifties diet. The school dentist was always busy.  

Even now, I have honey on toast for tea when lazy, and Carnation “Cream” on tinned pears or apricots is luxury. Everyone here complains it is too sweet, so I have to have the whole tin myself. I don’t have treacle now, but the empty metal tins are great for all those bits and pieces you don’t know where to put: bath plugs, light pulls, door stops, picture hooks. Shame they risk disappearing in a squeezy plastic rebranding after 150 years unchanged. “... consumers need to see brands moving with the times and meeting their current needs. Our fresh, contemporary design brings Lyle’s into the modern day, appealing to the everyday British household while still feeling nostalgic and authentically Lyle’s,” said the brand director. “Drivel, bollocks, and bullshit,” said I. 

As regards the party, I have only one clear memory. Dad said we would play a game called “Follow The Moon”, but would say no more about it. The time came, and we waited outside the front room, with Mum and Dad inside, the door closed, and the curtains drawn. We were called in one by one.

The first went in, and after a short time cried “Aarrgh!” Then the next went in to join them, and made the same sound while the first person laughed. The third went in and reacted in the same way, causing the first two to laugh, and so it continued. 

I was last because it was my birthday. There was a sheet hanging vertically in the darkened room, with a circle of torchlight shining through. That was the moon. I had to keep my nose as close to the moon for as long as I could, while it moved around. It went up and down, and side to side, then faster in a circle, and, as both the moon and my nose reached the top of the sheet, a soggy warm wet sponge full of water came over from the other side and dunked me on the head. The others all roared with laughter.