New Month Old Post: first posted 12th November, 2016.
He was to be President of the United States, but across the North of England the word ‘trump’ remained an acceptable, almost polite substitute for the four letter word beginning with ‘f’ and ending with ‘t’ which to my mind is so coarse and common I can hardly bring myself to write it.
“Poo! Who’s trumped?” my mother would exclaim on walking into the room where my brother and I were playing. We might say that too, but if either of us had used the f-synonym we would have had our faces slapped as hard as if we had used that other f-word; not that we had ever heard either in those innocent times.
I was around eleven when I first heard the more common term for trumping. It came from an adult. We were on holiday near Southampton and had driven to London airport (not yet called Heathrow) to wave my aunt and cousins off to Aden. We waited inside a high glass-walled enclosure for their BOAC Britannia to take to the air, sheltered from the roar of the engines but not from the acrid smell of the fuel. It was close and stuffy, and the kerosene hung around us mixing with the pong from the clothes of a family friend who had been sick on the train travelling down with my aunt. To make matters worse my brother periodically kept discharging his own contribution into the atmosphere. We used to eat meat in those days.
I was mortified when another aero-watcher, a middle aged man, turned and forcefully told me to stop farting. I had no idea what he meant. The embarrassment stemmed not from what I had been wrongly accused of but from the fact that a complete stranger had spoken to me.
On another early nineteen-sixties holiday we drove to Devon in a hired Hillman Minx. It was a long journey from Yorkshire in those pre-motorway days, and as dusk fell we were still miles from our lodgings. My brother and I lay on the back seat comatose with headaches, trumping.
“Good God! It smells as if somebody’s babbered themselves,” complained Mum. I knew it was bad because she rarely blasphemed.
“Can we have a drink of water?”
“No. You’ll be widdling and piddling all the way. You’ll have pickled yersel’s before we get there.”
“I could do with a jimmy riddle myself,” said Dad from the driving seat.
Like most people from the South, my wife had never come across this usage of the word ‘trump’, but she soon picked it up, as of course have our children. It seems more humorous than offensive.
I am convinced it used to appear in a dictionary we had at Junior School. We used to look it up and giggle. “Trump”, it read, “a small explosion between the legs.” Perhaps I am mistaken because I cannot find it anywhere now. I am told, however, that the Oxford English has the definition: “to break wind audibly (slang or vulgar).”
But as for “President Trump”, to me it sounds more of a command than a title of high status.
I used to have a book by a pair of American educationalists called Curtis Jay Bonk and Kira S. King. Students used to call it the bonking book. The surnames of the two authors were juxtaposed on the spine in such a way as to make it look as if it was a book about bonking: “a bonking good read” perhaps.
The cover shows the first author’s name in full, but in the rest of the book and on his web site he goes by the shorter Curt Bonk. Does he know how that sounds to English ears? Perhaps he does. It might be his come on line.
I’m not sure when I first encountered the word “bonk”. It wasn’t at school in Yorkshire. Bonk would then have meant hitting someone on the top of the head, or perhaps the percussive knock made by a large piece of wood. Runners and cyclists also now use it to mean running out of energy. I don’t think it emerged in the sexual sense until the nineteen-seventies. I can imagine Jo Kendall’s elegant but naughty voice saying it in “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again”, but perhaps she never actually did. It would have amused me if she had.
The alternatives would have been completely unacceptable on broadcast media before the -seventies, despite the efforts of Brendan Behan and Kenneth Tynan who came out with the f-word on live television in the -fifties and -sixties, or even the music hall comedian Hector Thaxter who is said to have got away with “arse” on the radio in 1936.
Most of us don’t seem to notice swearing now. It was better when it was the exception rather than the rule. It was kinder when the worst we heard was “naff off” and “bonk”.
“That’s wrong” said Geoffrey Bullard, with his thick ape-neck and menacing stare. “It should be M Dunham is crap”. His fat finger stabbed at the offending word.
He thought he knew everything, and everyone else was stupid. It was too risky to explain. Football teams are plural: Rawcliffe United are great this year; Howden Town are terrible; M Dunham are crap. You can chant it:
M Dunham are crap, M Dunham are crap, Ee aye addio, M Dunham are crap.
A league match between M Dunham and T Dunham c1960
It was my dad who first pretended we were football teams
in a league. He was B Dunham, I was T
Dunham, my brother Martin was M Dunham, and M Dunham were crap. It said so in red wax crayon on the back of the asbestos garage where Geoffrey Bullard had spotted it.
I didn’t realise that wax crayon on asbestos panelling is like permanent marker: waterproof, indelible, not-fade-away. There it was, and there it must have stayed for decades. Imagine the disapproving faces that pitied the ignorant child responsible, and wondered who was M Dunham, and why was he crap.
So, Geoffrey Bullard remained oblivious of the imaginary football teams, and, when he wasn’t round at our house bullying me, I could play imaginary football games in the garden. I had a full league of teams and fixtures, and played out each match on my own on the pitch of dried mud we optimistically called “the back grass”. This differed from “the front grass” only by being slightly bigger and by not actually having any grass, except that is for a few odd blades that struggled out of the earth before being unceremoniously stamped back in again by the boots of make-believe footballers.
I ran up and down with the ball, puffing and panting between one goal defined by chalk marks on the wall of the house and the other by the clothes posts near the back hedge, while providing the roars and boos of the crowd, and an excitable commentary. In my head they were all there: two complete teams of players, spectators, a commentator, the referee, the linesmen and the trainer with his ‘magic sponge’.
I drew up team sheets, match day programmes, fixture lists and league tables. I was everyone and did everything. These days, kids do the same with electronic games like ‘Top European Football Manager III’, but my fantasy was played in the back garden, much healthier for all the running around in the fresh air, with better transferrable skills from the manual record keeping, and no less unsociable than games consoles.
T Dunham were of course the best team by far. They always won and hardly ever conceded a goal. They usually beat M Dunham (who really were crap) by several goals to nil, and “The” B Dunham by a similar margin (my dad had once been to watch “The” Arsenal while on holiday in London).
It was not long before T Dunham were promoted out of the league containing the other Dunham teams into the local district league, where they played against proper teams such as the colliery, the dockers and the railwaymen, and teams from pubs and local villages. I picked my players for each match and posted their names on the wall inside our team hut, in other words the yellow shed.
The team was always set out in traditional 1-2-3-5 formation, with a goalkeeper, two full backs, three half-backs and five forwards. In those days we always had a centre forward, inside forwards and wingers; no one had yet heard of modern formations involving sweepers, overlapping midfielders and offensive 4-3-3 game plans.
One day, Geoffrey Bullard noticed a team sheet on the wall of the shed. “What’s that?” he asked, looking carefully. My team was laid out for all to see, ready for the West Riding Cup Final between T Dunham and Norton Woodseats. The captain, ‘Dunham’, in other words me, was on the left wing, my position the only time I had ever been selected for the school team. Some of the other imaginary players were also names from school. ‘Gelder’ was inside-left, ‘Longthwaite’ was centre-forward, and, as I realised to my consternation the same moment he spotted it, ‘Bullard’ was centre-half.
“Why am I only centre-half?” he demanded to know.
I cringed inwardly while he thought about it. He considered himself one of the best footballers in the school and naturally assumed his rightful role was top scorer in the forward line.
“Actually,” he then said weighing it up, “I would make quite a good centre-half,” and let me off the hook by showing no further interest.
But the wax crayon was still on the garage, and in due course my mother saw it.
“It won’t come off,” she sounded annoyed. “And anyway, what does it mean?”
It dawned on me that I didn’t really know what ‘crap’ meant either. I’d heard people say it, and thought it a satisfyingly grown up word to use. It just seemed to mean someone or something wasn’t very good. You could snarl it in real disgust, curling your upper lip, emphasising the ‘r’ and spitting out the final ‘p’. “C-RAP!” I had been saying it as much as I could.
“What’s this word, ‘crap’?” my dad asked. My mother had obviously been talking to him.
It was my dad’s sister, Aunty Dorothy, a hospital nurse, who gently enlightened us as to what it meant. She took me aside and asked in her quiet way: “Was it you who wrote in wax crayon on the back of the garage? You wrote, ‘M Dunham are crap’, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well, you do know what it means, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“It’s very very rude,” she said looking serious. “It means babba.” *
I wanted to giggle, but tried hard to look horrified and apologetic.
“It’s not a word we should be using at all,” she warned sternly. “And in any case, it’s very wrong to say that. It should be M Dunham is crap.”
* It seems that using the word ‘babba’ to mean poo is not as universal as I once thought. An internet search reveals very few examples. Similarly, ‘trump’ meaning an emission of wind, also seems to be mainly a northern expression. Both were common in the part of Yorkshire where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The word ‘crap’, on the other hand, was beyond vulgarity and never heard. It goes to show how much things have changed.
Was his name Dennis? Something like that. He was the next-door-neighbour’s great nephew who visited a couple of times from Grimsby or wherever it was they lived. He might have been ten or eleven, a year or two older than me.
I showed him the big old apple tree at the end of our garden. I said it would be full of apples if he came in the autumn. I climbed up, placing my feet safely in the
joins and firmly grasping the limbs.
“Dead easy,” he said, and scrambled up to join me. “Can you swing along there?” he dared me, indicating an outward-growing horizontal branch about ten feet from the ground.
Below the end of the branch, about twelve feet (four metres) from the trunk, stood a metal clothes post. I had helped my dad dig the hole and fill an old oil drum with cement to anchor it there. Dennis’s idea was to swing hand-over-hand along the branch, wrap your legs round the post, transfer your hands to the top, and slide down like a fireman. He showed me how effortless it was, then climbed back up and did it again: one – two – three – wrap legs – grab post – slide down. It looked brilliant – like a monkey.
It was some weeks before I plucked up courage to try. It was one of those tricks that is much easier than it looks provided you don’t waver. I could do it half a dozen times in a row. My mother said it was dangerous and told me to stop.
One day it went wrong. I’m not sure what happened. I must have missed the third hand hold as I swung my legs forwards towards the clothes post, and fell straight down and landed flat on my back. My mother had seen it all from the kitchen window and rushed out terrified.
“I thought I told you to stop that,” she yelled at me as I got up, a bit dazed, “You could have broken your bloody back.”
It was more in fury than sympathy. Sympathy wasn’t her line. Any stupidity or misbehaviour tended to get an angry slap across the cheek. Whenever my brother or I drove her to her wits end, she would glare with pursed lips in the most terrifying way, growing red in the face until veins stood out in her temples.
As children we had little awareness of adults going through difficult times. Grown-ups were strong and invincible. What I now know is that my mother was not coping well. My grandfather had died suddenly before his time, and my grandmother needed a lot of support, especially in her shop. Much of this had fallen to my mother because her sister had seriously injured her hip in an accident. She was having to spend two days a week at Grandma’s, a five-mile bus ride away. We had also become close friends with the widow and her elderly mother who lived next door to us, but the old lady had died too, stretching my mother even further. And like many northern women then, she was entirely responsible for the house and children, and must have been persistently exhausted. We did not see any of that. We only saw that she could look angry and slap hard, and we knew when to back down.
One day I didn’t back down. I lost my temper and answered back. I had dared to think I was old enough to deserve more respect.
I had been teasing my younger brother in the garden, calling him by some new rude words from school. My mother rushed out, angry at the foul language the neighbours might hear.
“Get inside and wash your mouth out with soap,” she bellowed, pointing at the door.
“Don’t you tell me what to do.” For that I received a furious slap across the face.
“Arse, shit and bugger!” I snapped, and slapped her face back in retaliation.
Steam squirting out of ears barely begins to describe her expression. I didn’t wait to see what was next. I turned and fled to the end of the garden and shot up the apple tree. I had to stay there a couple of hours.
Funnily, there were no repercussions. I crept back into the house to overhear my mother chuckling as she described the incident to my dad. Perhaps we both learned something that day.
Soon afterwards the horizontal branch was pruned to make way for a garage, and the clothes post moved to a different place in the garden. That ended the monkey behaviour. There was no more face slapping either.
