The Bootnapper

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  kidnap victim

Back in the nineties I lived quite the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. I played rhythm guitar in a band, I had long hair and I partied hard most weekends. It was an age of fantastic new music, and it came at a time when we were young and energetic enough to dance the night away. Every weekend we did the mashed potato to Mudhoney, the hustle to Hole, the samba to Soundgarden.

One Friday night I was at the flat of my mate Nige, who had a dozen or so people round after the pubs shut. We swigged to the sound of Mudhoney until the neighbour banged on the wall to signal last orders, and most people went home.

But I hung about. Nige had gone to bed and I was lying at full stretch on the settee with a duvet. The only other person in the room was my mate Graeme, who was curled up on an armchair with a blanket. He told me that he couldn’t get comfortable and asked me if I fancied swapping. I laughed and gave him a two-word reply, accompanied by a two-fingered salute. Then I gave an exaggerated account of how wonderfully comfortable Nige’s settee was.

Soon after this though my bursting bladder began demanding my attention. I couldn’t hold it in any longer so I pulled the duvet aside. Graeme appeared to be asleep so I crept off the settee and made stealthily towards the door that led to the bathroom. No sooner had I reached this door than I heard a yell of triumph, and I saw Graeme leap from the armchair onto the settee. I was crestfallen.

I curled up on the armchair with the blanket but I had to tolerate the combined irritations of being unable to get comfortable, and Graeme’s exaggerated pretend snoring. Eventually though, I did drift off to sleep.

I woke up before it was light and, although it was summertime, the room was cold. I decided to go home, so I folded the blanket and put on my shoes. Graeme was in a deep drunken slumber by this time, and so I decided to have me some revenge on him for stealing the settee from me.

The obvious pranks, like shaving an eyebrow or drawing on his face, crossed my mind, but I wanted something different. After a moment’s thought I hatched a plot worthy of Dick Dastardly himself. I left the flat a few minutes later, and walked through the dark, deserted streets quietly chuckling to myself.

In the morning Graeme and Nige were up and chatting about the party. Graeme had laced up one of his Dr. Marten boots but he couldn’t find the other one. Then Nige found the note I had left on the fireplace, which read:

If you want to see your boot again bring a packet of Hob-nobs to ** Marine Terrace on Saturday morning.

No tricks

No police

Graeme’s options came down to either walking around to my flat, which was about a quarter of a mile away, in stockinged feet, or as he was, wearing one boot laced up. He opted for the latter.

As he hobbled through the streets in one boot on that busy Saturday morning, Graeme had the misfortune to run into a cousin of his, who was going shopping in the town centre with his wife and family. They laughed at Graeme’s comical gait, and asked what on earth he was doing walking around with one boot on. He showed them the note.

Graeme arrived at my flat soon after this but he took the prank in good humour, as I knew he would. We would go on to share flats on two occasions in the years following the bootnapping, and those happy times would be interspersed with pranks and practical jokes. We had quite a laugh about his boot over a cup of tea and some Hob-nobs, which Graeme had gone out to buy after he’d been fully shod. So he kept his side of the bargain.

Pinball Wizardry? Not Quite

In the town where I live, there is a patch of grass where there once stood a wine bar that mysteriously caught fire one night and burned down. When I was a child, that building had been a furniture showroom, but by the time I entered my teens it had transformed into a brightly-lit amusement arcade called The Leisure Centre – and I became an eager habitué.

The centre comprised a prize bingo at the rear, a snack bar, and at the front a collection of coin-operated amusements, some of which wouldn’t look out of place on Antiques Roadshow. A cassette tape of Elvis Presley’s early hits played almost constantly, and the centre was a great attraction for local skinheads, which made it a great attraction to me. There were one-armed bandits, a huge table football game with a glass lid, and a wall-mounted electronic penalty-kick game. Best of all though, there was a row of pinball machines along one of the walls.

These were Gottlieb machines that were two pence a shot (I remember playing on this baseball one). Over time, my friends and I got to grips with the finer points of these machines; how to trigger the specials and rack up a replay or two. If we couldn’t earn a replay via a high score, there was always a random number match at the end that might throw up what we called a lucky bop (bop being the sound the machine made when a free game was awarded).

None of us had much money, and we had soon put most of what we did have into the pin tables. As our resources dwindled, we took to sharing games, taking a flipper each and then arguing over whose fault it was that the ball was lost. More often than not, our bus fares would follow our spending money into the slots; an act we’d soon regret as we set off on the mile long walk home in the cold.

Then one day everything changed. A new kid on the block had arrived in the form of a Williams Straight Flush machine. This monster was five pence a game, but it was such an advancement on its predecessors there was no shortage of players eager to try it out.

The flippers on this new table were longer than the stubby ones we were used to, which made for a much sweeter strike. There were five lights above slots along the top of the table, at which to aim the ball – Ten, Jack, Queen, King and Ace – and if these lights were all put out, the special would be in play. On the upper left side of the table was a staircase with a spinner at the top. When the red arrow at the base was lit, flipping the ball up those stairs brought an extra ball. There was no sweeter feeling than to hold the ball on the right flipper, release it and then, as the ball rolled down, hit it at just the right time to watch it soar up that staircase to earn a free ball. An even better show of mastery though was to send the ball up the staircase on the back flip, i.e., via the left side flipper. A successful ascent of the staircase was usually hailed with the cry, get up them stairs.

One night, my friend and I went into the arcade to find half a dozen youths gathered around the Straight Flush machine, and we were surprised to see there were seven replays chalked up. We soon learned that these free games had less to do with pinball wizardry than with underhand jiggery-pokery.

There was a crack in the glass on the lower right corner of the machine. Someone had figured out that if the two sides of the crack were pulled apart, it was possible to poke a flattened and folded paper drinking straw through the gap and rack up lots of points by repeatedly pressing the trigger on the exit lane. The prime objective of the game immediately shifted to getting the ball down the Ten slot, as this would light the right side exit lane, and 5,000 points would be awarded every time it was depressed. Whenever the attendant was otherwise engaged, someone would set about poking up more high scores to earn buckshee replays. We would then take turns playing these games off.

I’m not sure if the management was aware of our freebie flipper fests, but after a week or so the glass on the table was replaced. So it was back to paying for our games, and sharing flippers, and walking home.

A sign of a mis-spent youth? Possibly, but it was fun while it lasted.

Here is the Williams Straight Flush machine in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITFVbmaVvU

Many thanks to Russ at Pinrescue.com for the use of the photo.

I Changed My Name

The photo is part of my birth certificate. I was given the same name as my dad, although there is a slight spelling discrepancy; he is (was) A-L-A-N, and I’m A-L-Y-N. I was later told that this way of spelling my name was prompted by my parents seeing the name of the musician/conductor Alyn Ainsworth on the credits of many TV shows back then. This written variation may have averted confusion in the mail department, but audibly there was no difference in the names. If my mother called, two of us would turn up. This situation was remedied by the addition of the prefix big or little before the actual name, so I became Little Alyn.

While ‘playing out’ one day, I came across a girl down the street who had at her feet a tin of Quality Street with the lid off. Even at that tender age I was well familiar with the interior of that tin, and the brightly coloured wrappers that enveloped delicious chocolate creations – apart from the golden flat disc; that was toffee and to be avoided. With my mouth already watering, I sidled up to the girl in the hope of a benevolent act taking place. I even dared to dream of peeling the foil off my favourite, the green triangle. As I watched, the girl took one of the sweets, the purple one, vaguely shaped like a tiny Ayers Rock, and removed the wrapper.

Now, at that young age, I’d not had much cause to apply the word devastated to my emotional state, but this was certainly one of those times. For what lay beneath the purple wrap was not chocolate, but chalk! What my friend had was a tin of dummy sweets that were used as part of a shop display. She obviously knew what they were all along, and she began chalking on a wall, singing happily. I wanted to cry.

But I picked myself up and several of my friends and I walked chalk-handed up to the wooden bus shelter that stood on Cowpen Road at the top of our street. Here we went on a chalking frenzy, drawing rudimentary cartoons and initially writing our own names, but then pairing each other off with girls from the street. Someone wrote David luvs Jakleen (our spelling skills weren’t yet honed), and that opened the gates. Over that half-hour we did more matchmaking than Cilla would years later on TV. As I paired Stuart with Lizzie, I wondered with whom I’d be ‘matched’. One of my friends had a cousin who occasionally visited, and she sometimes wore an orange trouser suit, which was a very grown-up thing to my eyes, and I was quite sweet on her. I secretly hoped that someone would write Alyn luvs Heather, but they never did.

As we subjected the shelter, and then the pavement, to mild, non-permanent vandalism, I was aware that this was the very bus stop my dad would be alighting at on his way home from work that evening. I banished my concerns with the reassurance that there were plenty of other Alyns in the world, and the culprit could have been any one of them.

Sure enough, that night my dad gave me a more thorough grilling than the kippers he’d just eaten for tea. He asked if I knew a David and a Stuart and a Jaqueline. I nodded to all three. He asked if I had been chalking my name up at the bus stop. This was awkward, for as well as the chalk, Cowpen Road, the main road as we called it, was strictly out of bounds to me. I tried to deny authorship of the graffiti, but after my dad explained that the spelling of my name was something of a rarity, I confessed my sins and earned a lecture on telling the truth. Dad didn’t seem too fussed about the chalking, but he did advise me to carry out any future scribbling sessions on the rendered gable end at the bottom of the street, out of general view.

And that was that. I thought I’d see out the rest of my days without any more name-related anecdotes to recount in later life. But I was wrong.

When I first attended the local grammar school, our maths teacher, Mr Thomas, a Welshman, had his own system for remembering the names of his new charges. The teacher would select one pupil at a time with a point of the finger. On being chosen, each pupil would stand up and say his or her first name, which the teacher would then chalk on the board in a list. I was a shy boy, and even this simple act, which would cause me to be the focus of attention, made me anxious. When it came to my turn, I cleared my throat and said Alyn. He chalked up ALAN. “Spelled like this?” he said. I said no. He wiped part of the name off and reapplied the chalk to make ALLAN. I shook my head. “Well,” he said, wiping the name off again, “it must be the same as mine,” at which he wrote ALUN. Again I shook my head. By this time, several pupils had turned in their chairs to gaze upon this idiot with the weird name. I spelled it out and he wrote it on the board, saying that he’d never seen the name spelled that way before, even though it looked Welsh. My face burned as I sat back down.

At this new school, teachers called me Joseph, as that is my first name. I didn’t correct them for fear of a repeat of the awkward maths moment. Fellow pupils started calling me Joe, and so I decided to go with that particular flow. On my bedroom wall there hung a Certificate of Merit: First Prize, Upper Juniors I’d won in a poetry competition at school (my prize was a Platignum cartridge pen). With ALYN staring at me from the this certificate, I decided to act. With a sharpened pencil, I changed the Y to an A with as much vigour as Cornwall himself; ”Out, vile consonant!”

And so I became Joe. My parents never called me by that name, and some people I’ve known since I was a child still call me Alyn.

One of these is my cousin, Phil. When he was about thirteen, Phil wore glasses. With these, and his ginger hair (strawberry blond, as he would have it), he bore quite a resemblance to the Gerry Anderson puppet Joe 90. This earned him the nickname Joe in some quarters, although I never called him by that name. One day I was having a pint in a local bar with Phil and a mutual friend called Kev. As we’d known each other since infancy, I called my cousin Phil and he called me Alyn. Kev sitting opposite, who must have though there was some sort of wind-up going on, called both of us Joe.

And now, official documents like my driving licence have me down as Alan, the same as my dad. When looking through my mail though, I know when I’ve received a letter from the doctor’s or hospital, because they still address me as Alyn, as was recorded when I was born. I find it quaint.            

Whatever Happened to the Beecher Lads?

The closing credits of the TV series Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads shows children playing in a partly-demolished house. Such activities would generally be frowned upon in today’s more cosseted world, where soft play is about as dangerous as it gets. Back in my childhood though there were no better playgrounds than the local dilapidated cemetery, abandoned allotments and, best of all, a pair of derelict flats.

I spent my formative years at 45 Beecher Street (I was actually born there), which was a ground floor flat on a terrace. When I was five or six years old, the occupants of the flats at the very bottom of the street, numbers 49 and 51, moved out, and no new tenants moved in.

As weeks turned to months it became clear that the bottom flats had seen their last occupants. Some older boys broke windows, and this opened up the lower flat to inquisitive urchins like me and my friends. My first exploration of the lower flat was a solo expedition that happened one afternoon. I entered the back yard intent on having a good look around, but I was immediately halted by an obstacle. The back door of the flat had been removed, so gaining access was easy, but floor of the kitchen, or scullery as we called it, was flooded. It was only an inch or so deep, but that would be enough to permeate my plimsolls. Someone had laid house bricks to serve as stepping stones, but my little legs couldn’t span the gap between the doorstep and the first brick. Luckily, the back yard was full of junk, and I found a lump of wood that I laid to make that first step reachable. I scampered over the bricks, noting on the way a perfectly round hole at the base of the wall. This must have been drilled to accommodate a pipe or cables, but I genuinely believed it to be a mousehole, a notion that was reinforced by the presence of a dead and sodden mouse that lay on a dry part of the floor in the corner. Once inside the flat, I was underwhelmed – it was completely empty and there was a pervading musty smell like damp wallpaper.

Access to the upstairs flat came when someone kicked out one of the panels in the front door. It was a narrow gap that only the slenderest could squeeze through, and after seeing one of my friends get stuck, I didn’t attempt entry. It wasn’t long though until a bigger youth kicked a hole in the wall at the bottom of the back stairs, so now the entire building was open to us.

Playing in those flats became an everyday pastime for us, even though over time everything of value was stripped from the building. Eventually, even the floorboards went, but before that happened we had quite an adventure below them.

One lad had a new battery-operated torch, so three of us decided to play at coal miners. In the living room of the downstairs flat, there was a square hole in the floor, and a second hole below the window on the opposite side of the room. There was a gap of about two-feet between the floorboards and the ground, and the plan was to enter by one hole and crawl along to exit via the one by the window.

We lowered ourselves in and started the crawl, singing Hi-ho (the original Song from Under the Floorboards?), and laughing and larking about as we went. As we approached the daylight of the second hole through which we hoped to emerge, we noticed something on the ground directly below the window. We saw that it was a newspaper parcel. Three pairs of eyes looked on as the torch shone on the package, and one of our number gingerly peeled back the top layer. Inside were two dead rabbits that were crawling with maggots.

A mad panic to get out ensued, but we had to crawl back to the entrance hole to escape. Peeling back the newspaper had unleashed the stench of decay, which, in that warm, airless environment, was almost unbearably pungent. We bumped heads off the ‘ceiling’ and tried to shove each other out of the way – a pointless exercise in that confined space. Finally, we clambered out, now laughing but greatly relieved. We went to the window hole to shine the torch on the ghastly mess from a safe distance, wondering who had dropped this parcel of putrefaction. My suspicion fell on the father of one of my fellow miners, but I said nothing.

One day, three teenage strangers from a nearby estate (big lads, as we would call them) came down the street, and they went into the upstairs flat. My friend David and I watched from the doorstep as they climbed into the loft via the hatch above the landing. We heard one of them mention copper wire, so we assumed that was what they were seeking. The pair of us ran off laughing when one of them defecated through the hatch. Grimly, it turned out that two of these three would later be jailed for separate murders.

Over time, the lower flat served as a garage to service our bicycles and home-built bogeys, a military hospital, a fort, a haunted house and, of course, a gang hut. It was also a strong room to store bonfire wood prior to Guy Fawkes’ night. As we grew out of the pretend garage phase, my friends and I lit fires inside the downstairs flat, and took great delight in kicking plaster off the interior walls and then smashing the laths that lay beneath.

With the building now an almost empty shell, there was still one last caper to be had under its leaky roof. In the small back bedroom of the lower flat, there remained intact a section of floorboards about two feet above the ground. This partial floor, which protruded about four feet from the wall, was at the end of the room opposite a hole where there once was a window. My friends and I saw the floor as a stage, and we took turns larking about like we were on Top of the Pops, while the others watched via the window-hole. I remember ‘performing’ Bend Me, Shape Me by Amen Corner with a length of cable for a microphone – to a chorus of boos and catcalls.

The deterioration continued. For some time our flat had a problem with mice, quite possibly refugees from those foodless unoccupied dwellings, and eventually we were rehoused to a brand new house on a nearby estate. Several other families from the bottom end of the street were also moved out, so we remained friends and neighbours. Back on Beecher Street there were now a dozen or so empty properties awaiting demolition, but which needed a thorough exploration first. There are tales to come from those, but another time.

The Young Truant

the life I longed for

As a child, I was a keen reader of comics. I had the Beano delivered every week, but I was well up to speed with what was going on in the Dandy, Beezer and Topper. Oor Wullie and The Broons also made occasional forages across the border too, bringing much merriment with them. I loved delving into summer specials and sitting down with a brand new Christmas annual after the pamdemonium of pressie-opening was a great way to relax while dinner cooked. I loved the smell of the ink.

I related to the characters within the colourful pages of my comics with ease. I wanted a tin friend like Charley Brand’s Brassneck. I longed for my own miniature remote-controlled army like General Jumbo. I dreamed of being Billy Whizz running to the shops for neighbours, and receiving an extra reward for being so quick. Sadly, those characters and their special powers, gadgets and pets were only available in dreams.

There was though one theme that was common in several strips, and that was easily within the reach of a schoolboy in Northumberland: playing truant, or, as it was often called in this neck of the woods, playing hookey or hopping the wag.

In the world of the comic, Oor Wullie, Charley Brand (Brassneck’s human friend) Spunky Bruce (pictured above with his giant spider, Scamper), and a host of others were often to be found skipping school and getting into all kinds of scrapes – after they had hidden the school bag. My first venture onto the wrong side of the tracks was not influenced by any comic book character though, as I could barely read at the time.

hiding the bag

I was still in the infants on the day that I succumbed to the temptress freedom. At the time I lived close to the school and so I went home for lunch. One afternoon, instead of going back to school, curiosity lured me into a nearby back lane where a row of garages stood. I squeezed through a gap between two of the garages and this brought me into a farmer’s field, from where I could see my school and hear the children playing. The loud clanging of the bell that signalled the end of the lunch break also served as a reminder that I was now officially AWOL.

When silence fell as my school friends went back inside, I felt the proper outlaw, rummaging among the old crates and empty oil cans that were strewn behind the garages. Then I came across a pile of rubbish, on top of which was an object that made my little eyes light up: a real gun.

It was only a rusty old air pistol, but to me it was straight out of a Cagney film. I picked the gun up and went to take aim, but my feeble arms could hardly bear the weight, being used to brandishing only plastic cap guns. As I inspected the weapon, my adventure came to an abrupt end.

My mother, wearing her angry-as-hell face, emerged from between the garages (a neighbour had spotted me and snitched). I was ordered to leave the gun and to get my (now trembling) legs moving homeward, sharpish. I complied, devastated at having to leave the gun for someone else to find. Back home I was given a stern dressing-down and sent to the bedroom I shared with my older brother.

At that young age I didn’t realise the potential danger into which I could have been placing myself. My mother’s anger must have been coupled with a great fright that her son could wander off on his own to such a secluded area. I needed to be taught a lesson, and I certainly got one.

My mother came into the bedroom and she took my small suitcase from under the bed. She told me that she would be packing this, as I would be going to the Wellesley School for a while.

The Wellesley Nautical School was an approved school at the time and, for those of us living in close proximity to it, being sent there was the default threat with which parents steered wayward charges back onto a steady course. Even at that tender age, however, I had already been threatened with a trip to the Wellesley several times, and nothing had happened. I assumed that this would be another empty threat, but, such was the gravity of the situation, this time a more robust approach was required to make sure I got the message. As I sat in my room, confident that the worst was over and that by tea time all would be well again, my mother sneaked to the front door and rang the doorbell.

Suddenly I was alert. I wondered who had rang the bell and I listened intently. I heard my mother’s voice, but no other. Then I heard her say, “He’s in his room,” and the bedroom door opened.The realisation that she hadn’t been bluffing and this was really happening hit me like a train.

I shall bring James Cagney in again to illustrate what happened next. If you’ve seen the film Angels With Dirty Faces, then you’ll know that at the end Cagney’s tough guy character is dragged screaming for mercy to the electric chair* (spoiler alert). This was me. I turned yellow, clinging onto the bunk-bed headboard rails, wailing and pleading with my mother not to let them take me away.

Satisfied that I had learned my lesson, my mother left the room and I sobbed and stewed and slept. All was well by tea time, although one diner at the table was a little sheepish.

The punishment had the desired effect, and I went through the infants and juniors without once playing truant again. When I started the grammar school, however, the lure of freedom tempted me again – but that’s a story for another day.
*In the film, we never learn if Cagney’s character really was a coward, or if he did his friend a final favour by pretending to be yellow in order to discourage young tearaways from idolising gangsters.

 

 

Melon Farming for Beginners: A Brief History of Swearing in the Movies

up the down escalator

one of her five-a-day

Back in the days of silent films, packed picture houses enjoyed the latest offerings of Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd to the accompaniment of suitable piano music. At one screening, a stereotypical villain, dressed in top hat and cape, strokes his moustache and then points a finger skyward as though a thought has struck him. The audience are told what this thought is in the form of a caption which reads: “I’m gonna nail that motherf—“. Cut.

Of course, this never really happened, because, for one thing I’m not sure how popular the ‘melon farmer’ word was back in those days (although it is said that the word can be lip-read, drowned out by a honking horn in the 1936 Fred Astaire film, Swing Time), and for another there was to be no mainstream on-screen swearing for many years to come.

The spoken…

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Games Among the Graves

the cemetery today

The residential area of Cowpen Newtown, where I lived as a child, consisted of three rows of terraced houses. The back lane of the westernmost of these, John Street, looked onto a cemetery that was in a state of some decay. The partly-demolished perimeter wall of this broken-down bone garden acted as a gateway to a huge playground for my friends and me. While we respected the actual graves, we couldn’t resist the other temptations that lay within. There were trees to climb, walls to scale and fires to set among the leaning headstones..

Our little gang would gather beneath the huge stone cross that stood (and still stands) in the centre of the cemetery. From here we would decide what we were going to play, be it hide and seek, a go on the rope swing, or perhaps a shootout between the gravestones with our Sekiden guns. There was always some adventure or other to be had.

My friend, David, and I once tried to make a mini-treehouse by securing an old zinc bath to a bough with a length of rope. The entire structure slid off the supporting branch with both of us sitting in it, but the rope held and we managed to hang on without either of us falling to the ground.

One Saturday afternoon, four of us were playing among the gravestones, when we were accosted by one of the ‘big lads’ from the street, who would have been about thirteen. He carried an air pistol and he corralled us at gunpoint with the intention of taking us to the priest, who lived on the other side of a busy road. Our captor marched us toward the main road, waving the gun about and telling us that we would be punished for playing in the cemetery. He lined us up on the kerb and, as he watched for a gap in the traffic, my fellow prisoners and I simultaneously made a bolt for it. Our escape was entirely successful, although I did spend the rest of that weekend in dread of a visit from the priest.

When I was about five-years-old, someone dumped an old mattress in a corner of the cemetery a few feet from the wall, and a new game of paratroopers was devised. I enviously watched, as a queue of older children leaped from the wall onto the mattress, doing various dramatic rolls on landing. I declined their invitation to join in, but later on, when I was alone, I drummed up the courage to have a go myself.

I climbed the wall, and took up my position by the battered mattress. A thick bed of nettles stood between me and my target but, undeterred, I stood on the edge of the wall and prepared to jump. I kept getting a powerful urge to leap, but this was quickly stifled as caution regained control of my mind. Finally, after a lot of dithering, I went for it.

I didn’t make it. I fell short and the nettles stung my bare legs but my momentum carried me forward, and I stumbled onto the damp mattress. It hurt like the devil, but I was satisfied that I had made the jump.

I also learned something very important that day, and on many other occasions when I attempted similar feats; I learned my own limitations. Through my mishap on the mattress I had given myself a better indication of how far I could jump. Via a similar process of trial and error, I identified other boundaries, such as whether a tree branch was too high to drop from safely, or the stick that acted as a seat on a rope swing would bear my weight.

For this is how it goes throughout the animal kingdom. A small kitten may fail in its attempt to leap between settee and armchair, but it will know better next time. Polar bear cubs will frolic as they explore snow for the first time, but they are familiarising themselves with the environment in which they will have to survive. And, in a dilapidated graveyard, a young boy leaping onto an old mattress learned that next time he must go an extra foot. Discovering our limitations is not something that can be taught indoors on a games console.

There was an article on the radio recently about so-called cotton-wool kids, these being children who are kept indoors because their parents fear they might get hurt while playing outside. In a recent survey, over 40% of adults suggested fourteen as the minimum age for children to be allowed out on their own, while only 17% said this freedom should be given to children under ten..

I learned several hard lessons as a child, and my mother would have had kittens if she’d known everything I got up to. But I came through it all relatively unscathed, and those scrapes and bumps and nettle stings I picked up taught me at an early age that life does not always run as smoothly I’d like it to.

I’m no child psychologist, but perhaps a lot of the entitlement we see in young adults these days stems from them not learning that lesson as children

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London, Here I Come!

London belongs to me

I made my first trip to London when I was ten-years-old. My grandparents took me to see an aunt, who had the curious name of Dorrie, and who lived in Burnt Oak, a suburb in the Edgware district of North London. My older brother had made the trip the previous year, and he had returned with tales of tube trains, waxworks and two apple trees in the garden.

We went by overnight coach from Newcastle, but even at that young age I was never the best of sleepers. As my grandparents dozed, I leaned into the aisle so that I could stare through the windscreen at the giant passing road signs, waiting for the magic name to appear (it came around the Sheffield area if I remember rightly). I was enthralled by this nocturnal world of cats-eyes, blazing headlights and motorway services that stayed open all night.

By the time we reached London, just as the local populace headed for work, I was shattered. A short taxi ride later and we were knocking at the door of our destination, and I met Dorrie for the first time. After tea and toast, I was dispatched to a small bedroom on the ground floor. It was clean and comfortable and I was soon fast asleep.

We did nothing that day, but in the evening my auntie and grandparents went out to a pub at the bottom of the road, leaving me alone in the strange house after I’d assured them I’d be all right. I had a plentiful supply of sweets and pop, and I tried reading my Beano Summer Special, but I couldn’t settle in the unusual surroundings, especially when dusk fell. A wooden standard lamp with fringed shade cast a gloomy light upon a huge old sideboard on which stood a mantel clock with a loud tick and a framed photograph of a soldier in uniform.

Somewhat spooked, I went outside, where I felt safer because people were on the street. I took a stroll down to the pub where my grandparents sat, and I returned to the house, where I spent the rest of the night leaning on the gate. I darted indoors when I saw my grandparents approaching.

The following day, we set about exploring the capital and I took my first trip on the tube. I was fascinated by the long wooden escalators which gave off a smell that I assumed to be warm lubricating oil. The walls of the stations and escalators were awash with posters advertising new films, and I was somewhat disturbed by the defiant two-fingered salute given by Billy Casper on posters advertising Kes. Another film that was advertised at that time was The Watermelon Man. I saw both of these when I got older and one remains a much-loved favourite, while the other was as forgettable as an advert for grass seed. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you which is which.

We were on the Northern Line, and the stations we passed through had names that were new to me: Brent Cross, Belsize Park and Chalk Farm. I loved the rocking of the train as it sped through dark tunnels; the screeches and the flashes. We visited Buckingham Palace (I wasn’t impressed) and Trafalgar Square, where I got my photo taken with some feathered friends (that’s my gran behind me on the right, getting ready to hand her money over to Del Boy for the snaps). I went to bed that night in that state of tiredness that only comes after a day spent traipsing around a busy town or city.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of someone rapping on the window of my bedroom. Puzzled, I got up and, rather gingerly, pulled back the curtain. I don’t think the word gobsmacked was in use at that time, but it would have been the perfect way to describe what I saw. There, in the garden, were my two brothers and, further back, my parents. My solo jaunt had turned into a family holiday.

When my grandparents got over the shock of the new arrivals, we went for the only time the other way on the tube, to Edgware. All I remember of that trip is being in a pub drinking lemonade while a band played on the stage. My older brother drew my attention to the rather stout saxophonist, and the comical way he sucked in breath as he played. His lips were tight around the mouthpiece, until he gulped in air, when the side of his mouth would open up, and then snap shut as sharply as a mousetrap. I found this hilarious.

London had shown me many things I’d never seen before, but one place we visited left me green with envy – and it wasn’t on the usual tourist trail. We were in Battersea (minus grandparents and Dorrie), and my dad took us into an adventure playground. To a street urchin like me, this rickety-looking rat-run was a merger of Shangri La, Utopia and El Dorado, all held together with nails and rope.

I ran and climbed and swung without parental yells to come down before I hurt myself. I loved the whole idea of a home-made assault course, cobbled together with old doors, car tyres and telegraph poles. The Battersea Adventure Playground was probably my favourite part of the entire London trip.

During my research for this post, I checked out the adventure playground to see if it was still going. I was pleased to see that it is, but saddened to see that it is no longer free and that the original structure was demolished in 2014. Fourteen staff were employed in the playground, supervising activities and running workshops for children. Of course, during these austere times, there is no room for paid staff, so the new park is safe and unsupervised – and it costs money to enter.

I wrote in a previous post of the way my local swimming pool closed a warm and inviting cafe, which was part of the appeal of a trip to the baths, to be replaced by soulless vending machines situated in empty seating areas. It would appear that the cuts that did for my cafe have also done for the Battersea Adventure Playground.

This is not a political blog, but I am sick to the teeth of seeing services that were used and loved being either closed down or run on the cheap in the name of cutting our way to growth. Swimmers of the vending machine generation know only the bare, unstaffed seating area. They missed out on the post-swim banter with staff over a frothy Horlicks while waiting for a hot dog. And what price would you put on the childrens’ workshops at the Battersea Adventure Playground which have been discontinued because saving money is, to some, more important than broadening the mind of a child (read that link above for the whole sorry tale). It all makes for a colder, less communicative world. And it stinks.

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What I Learned on Beecher Street

the street on which I was born

In the Family Guy episode Brian Griffin’s House of Payne, Brian has written a TV script, the title of which is What I Learned on Jefferson Street. This got me thinking of things I learned, not via school or my parents, but on the street. As the following examples demonstrate, my peers did not offer the best advice.

Birds Can Count

My friend Stuart showed off a display box he had been given by his uncle. It was a shallow cardboard affair in which the blown eggs of several different species of bird reposed on a bed of sand. While I was quite enthralled by the range of sizes, colours and patterns of the eggs, I was never tempted to start my own collection, partly because I was the world’s worst tree-climber, and partly because my dad was dead against the activity.

Several of my friends did take up bird nesting though, and one piece of nonsense I swallowed at the time was the notion that birds can count the number of eggs they lay. It was a girl from my street who started it all when she sad that if a blackbird has five eggs in her nest, you can safely take two because blackbirds can only count to three. I didn’t know how she knew this, but I believed her and so did others. She became quite the oracle of oology, dishing out advice for guilt-free nesting, and delivering her teachings with such confidence I envisaged bird nesters coming from surrounding estates and beyond to seek her wisdom.

“O Great One, I know of a partridge’s nest in a field up the road that has sixteen eggs. How many may I take?”

“The partridge can count up to twelve, my son, so you may take four.”

This didn’t happen though, because the bandwagon was jumped upon and suddenly everyone was an expert on birds and how many eggs they could count. Then the whole racket fell into rapid decline when an older boy, whose views on such matters were respected, dismissed the entire craft as bunkum. Of course, on learning this, we said that we knew all along that it was nonsense, and that we were just pretending to believe in it.

I did pick up some useful information in the company of these nest looters, though. One of their favourite pastimes was to brag about the rare eggs they had (at home, of course, where no-one could see them). Through this, I learned the names of exotic sounding birds, such as the redstart, the ring ouzel and the mysterious, and completely non-existent, nettle weaver.

Bitumen is Edible

There was an outsider on our patch. He was a little older than me and we came across him skulking about by the derelict flats at the bottom of the street. Our little gang befriended the stranger, whose name was Kev, and once the ice was broken, our new friend suggested putting a football team together.

He marched us up to the top of the street, where a huge lawn at the front of a tailoring factory served as our football pitch. We knew our new manager was serious, because he soon had us doing sprints and running on the spot. As we paused to get our breath back after a strenuous stint, Kev spotted a huge chunk of bitumen as used by roofers, under a bush.

“Anyone fancy some tarry-toot?” he said. He picked up the chunk and threw it onto the concrete road, where many shards shattered off it, shiny and untouched. To our astonishment, he put a small piece in his mouth and began chewing it. He gathered a handful of the shards, which he offered to us like they were foil wrapped chocolate balls, popular at ambassadors’ parties. Gingerly, we took a piece each and began chewing.

It wasn’t like chewing gum at all. It was hard and nowhere near as pliable as the gum I knew and loved, and its bitter taste reminded me of coal-tar soap. After some chewing the bitumen did soften, but only to the consistency of well-chewed toffee, so blowing bubbles with it was out. Once in this pliable state, the bitumen could be moulded, and we had many laughs making out we had missing teeth, or no teeth at all.

Despite its unappetising appearance and unpleasant taste, we took a large chunk of the bitumen, or tarry-toot as we now called it, down to our end of the street after practice so it was on hand should we fancy a chew. Rumours as to the harmful effects of chewing bitumen merely served as encouragement to fly in the face of danger and chew some more. Girls would recoil in disgust on being offered a piece, and that would be our cue to start chewing a slab like some GI in a war film.

But bravado was really its only attraction. There was minty fresh chewing gum available for coppers, and Anglo Bubbly (I must have chewed my own weight in those) and Bazooka Joe bubble gums were soft and chewy, not hard and brittle, and what trickled down your throat was sweet, delicious and safe.

Kev disappeared, the football team folded and we left the bitumen to the roofers.

W.I.M.P.E.Y

At the bottom of our street there was a sizeable area of scrub that led down to the river. One day, the excavators moved in, as work began on a new factory development. There was plenty of earth to shift, and so a fleet of yellow tipper trucks, each emblazoned with the name WIMPEY along the side, set about the task. I liked to watch these mechanical monsters rumble along the main road at the top of our street like a brightly coloured version of the 1957 film Hell Drivers. Some of the trucks had faces drawn on their radiator grills, and one driver gave me the thumbs-up as he drove past.

At school I told my friends of the trucks with the cartoon faces and the thumbs-up sign. When we were let out for playtime, we went up to the gates that looked onto the main road, even though this was strictly out of bounds. We didn’t wait long for our first yellow truck, and we all stuck up our thumbs. The driver responded and we were delighted. Someone told me that Wimpey was not a name, but an acronym (although he didn’t use that word). He said it stood for We Imploy More People Every Year. At that age I was unfamiliar with the word ‘employ’, so I accepted it as fact.

Our new game drew the attention of other pupils, and pretty soon almost the entire school was gathered at the gates, giving the thumbs-up to passing Wimpey trucks. When the teacher came out to an empty yard, she must have almost had kittens as the thought of mass abduction flashed through her mind.
The headmistress gave the whole school a warning that any further trips to the top of the yard would result in punishment. And that was that, because by the time we got home from school and had our teas, the trucks had knocked off for the day.

When we were having our tea one night, my dad brought up the subject of the Wimpey trucks. He said that they had almost made him miss his bus for work that morning, as he couldn’t cross the road because of them. I saw this as a chance to show off my knowledge on the subject. “Did you know,” I said, “that Wimpey stands for We Imploy More People Every Year?” My dad laughed and explained why that couldn’t be so.

What I learned on Beecher Street that day was that ‘employ’ starts with an ‘e’.

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Frights and Scares, Under the Stairs

‘effulgent effigies. . .’

I lived with my brothers and parents in Beecher Street, which was in some state of dilapidation at the bottom end. Conditions were such that I remember the landlord coming one day to cold-chisel off the plaster in the tiny bedroom I shared with my elder brother because of damp in the wall. These conditions were not conducive to good health, but to my young mind the damp wall offered the means to cool down during hot summer nights. I remember pressing my bare legs against the peeling Yogi Bear wallpaper for relief.

When I was seven-years-old, the breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs ran a promotion in which a ghostly glow-in-the-dark plastic figure came free in each pack. These included a bat, a broomstick-riding witch, a ghostly suit of armour, a spook, a skull and crossbones, a grandfather clock, a startled cat and a ghostly woman in a long dress (I took this woman for a Miss Havisham type as a child, but, thanks to the wonder of the Internet, I see now that she is sporting a ruff, making her a Mary Queen of Scots figure.) To display this collection of effulgent effigies, the empty cereal box could be made into a creepy Haunted Manor set, complete with sweeping staircase and Gothic windows.

As far as I remember, we had the complete set. My mother assembled the display box  and the figures were put into place. Then came a problem. We had already waited ages to collect the figures, now we would have to wait until nightfall before we could see them in their glowing glory. As everyone knows, children are not the most patient of animals, so an interim solution had to be found.

My mother stood the display on a shelf in the roomy cupboard that stood in the passage, beneath the stairs that led to the flat above. We peered in and I was immediately fascinated, and not a little unnerved, at the sight of these ghostly figures glowing in the darkness. I found ‘Miss Havisham’ most frightening, but this was possibly because she perfectly resembled an image I had formed in my mind of the ghostly apparition Ginny Green Eyes, a local phantom whose hauntings had been related to us by my dad.

When my mother had a clear-out of the cupboard one day, it was like the Generation Game conveyor belt to me, as she unearthed items I had never seen before: toys that had been my older brother’s, including a plastic squeaking clothes peg, a gas mask and my dad’s forage cap from his national service in the RAF.

One Boxing Day, when I still had faith in the big guy in the red suit, my dad put his coat in the cupboard and I spied within its darkened depths a box with a brightly coloured lid. When the opportunity arose, I sneaked a peek into the cupboard, and I found the box from the Airfix Motor Racing track we had received for Christmas, and which had been set up in the living room – by Santa himself, I presumed. Other boxes from our Christmas haul were there too. I tried to pictured Santa stuffing the boxes into the cupboard as he made his silent escape, but it didn’t feel right and the seeds of doubt as to his existence had been sown.

One time, my father had to attend a residential training course. This meant that my brothers and I could sleep in the ‘giant’ double bed in my parents’ room. The three of us sleeping in our parents’ bed was a novelty, to be taken full advantage of. We used it as a trampoline, held wrestling bouts on its great surface area, and generally larked about until my mother restored order, and we settled down for the night. She sat on the edge of the bed to tell a bedtime story to my younger brother, who was little more than a baby. My other brother and I were happy to listen in to the tale, albeit while kicking each other under the blankets.

As we began to drift off to our mother’s gentle voice, there came the sound of an abrupt snap, which halted the narration. This woke me up, and I opened my eyes to see my mother rising from the edge of the bed. She left the bedroom and walked into the passage outside, followed by two of her three ducklings.

She went into the cupboard under the stairs, and pulled out a mouse trap with a freshly killed victim. I got a good look at the corpse as she walked past on her way to the bin, and I noticed a dark beady eye looking at me. While my mother was away, my brother and I heard movement inside the cupboard. We hurried back to the safety of the bed and my mother returned, but the story would be interrupted a further two times that night by the snapping of the trap.

Looking back now on the sound of movement coming from the darkness of the cupboard, and the three mice that were caught in one night, I would say that our pest problems were approaching infestation levels. The cupboard under the stairs was clearly Mouse HQ, but the bedroom in which my elder brother and I slept was at the back of the flat, away from the scourge that inhabited the cupboard. Until that night, we were unaware of the seriousness of the situation.

Obviously, something had to be done, and we were eventually re-housed in a brand new three-bedroom semi on a nearby council estate. The good thing was that a sizeable chunk of our street had been condemned alongside our flat, so many of my friends moved into the same estate and we all stayed together. As far as I am aware, the mice were not re-housed.