Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  But the Tower Ballroom has lost none of its sparkle. The mighty organ still rises up out of the floor to the strains of ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’, though Reginald Dixon and Ernest Broadbent are long gone.

  If I sit on the velvet-covered seats that surround the dance floor and half close my eyes, I can see a woman in a homemade peach-coloured brocade dress and a man in a smart grey suit dancing together. She rests the back of her left hand on his right shoulder, and he has his right arm round her narrow waist. She wears suede high-heeled shoes, and he guides her confidently across the ballroom, his feet seeming to slide over the floor without touching it as he manoeuvres her in graceful circles. They only have eyes for one another, and the rest of the holidaymakers dance round them like moths round a flame. Listen carefully and you can catch the tune. He is humming as he dances, and she is smiling in that contented way she has when he holds her. The organ is not its usual ebullient self. It is softer now, more gentle, and the words come floating from somewhere up on the balcony – ‘When I grow too old to dream, I’ll have you to remember …’

  The station is at the very centre of Ilkley – at the top of Brook Street – and until Dr Beeching wielded his axe, you could travel both eastwards and westwards out of the town. Now you can only go to Leeds and Bradford.

  I got up at four in the morning one day in the mid-1960s to see the old iron railway bridge taken down by a crane. That day the view from the top of Brook Street to the distant woods of Middleton was opened up for the first time in a century. We should have been grateful for the improvement, but there was an air of sadness about it all, not least because now we were only connected to two industrial towns, rather than to Skipton – the ‘Gateway to the Dales’ – and all stations onwards to the west coast of Lancashire and the Lake District.

  In the 1960s, if you hadn’t got a car, you were stuck, unless you were prepared to wait for the bus, and they took hours. But in the 1950s, the railway could take you wherever you wanted to go.

  To Catch a Train

  ‘Quick! It’s comin’!’

  I was at the bottom of the steps of the railway bridge when my sister called. Dawdling again. Looking at some crummy wild flower – a bit of jack-by-the-hedge growing in a crevice of the pavement, or convolvulus, snaking its way through the rusty chain-link fencing alongside the track to open its milky-white trumpets that everybody seemed to hate. I thought it was spectacular, especially when it grew over the fence at the bottom of our garden. Dad hated it. Bindweed, he called it. Said its roots were ‘bloomin’ impossible to get rid of’. I wondered why he didn’t give up and just leave it.

  Kath’s voice was more insistent now: ‘Ala! You’ll miss it!’

  I left the bindweed to twine away without me and hared up the wooden steps of the sparkly silver-grey footbridge that crossed the railway line just outside the station. The roar was louder now – a deep-throated ‘chuff-chuff-chuff’, backed by a kind of thundery growl. I had to sprint the last few yards across the wobbly wooden boards, but just made it in time to see my sister disappear from view in an enormous cloud of grey-white smoke as the engine roared underneath us.

  We held our breath to avoid breathing in the mixture of coal dust, smoke and steam, but not always successfully; then we coughed ourselves silly for a few minutes and wiped our watering eyes. We’d be in trouble for the smuts on our clothes – ‘Have you been on that bridge again?’ – but it was worth it.

  It was thrilling and terrifying at the same time – the loudest noise we ever heard, and the nearest you could come to the kind of danger that would make your heart beat faster. It wasn’t surprising that half the boys in the class wanted to become engine drivers. There was even one, Johnny Williams, the only lad in the school as small as me, who still wanted to be an engine driver when they switched to diesels, but then he was a hard case.

  I had my Ian Allan trainspotter’s book in which the numbers were methodically ticked off, but I could never share with Johnny his passion for standing on a draughty station platform and – with a ruler, mind, not freehand – scoring through the numbers once he had spotted the train. They weren’t even particularly interesting numbers – 45393, that sort of thing. My little paperback book with the steaming locomotive on the front was full of them. Johnny’s was full of neatly Biroed lines.

  But the trains themselves would always excite. Before we boarded the train to Leeds or, in summer when trips to the west coast were on the cards, to Skipton where we’d change for Morecambe, I’d walk down to the front to take a look at the steaming engine. It would sit there like an animal just waiting to leap into action – hot water dribbling from it like saliva, and steam spurting with alarming unpredictability from under cowls and cylinders and out of copper pipes.

  A peep into the cab would reveal two black-faced and sweating men in faded blue overalls and peaked caps that seemed to be made out of tar, shovelling coal into the furnace or leaning on the thick black door drinking tea out of enamel mugs.

  ‘Can I come up, mister?’ I’d ask, but the answer would always be the same – ‘Nay, lad, we’re not allowed. But can you see the fire?’

  They’d open the door of the furnace and I’d stare at the flames inside – so hot they were almost white. I nodded. ‘I want to be an engine driver.’

  ‘Aye, but you’re nobbut a lad.’

  ‘When I grow up I mean.’

  White teeth would smile out of the soot-blackened face. ‘We’ll see. You might think differently then.’

  They didn’t seem to realise they had the best job in the world.

  Now it was my mother’s turn to be impatient. ‘Come on, Sparrow, or it’ll go without us.’

  She’d hold open the thick and heavy door, while Kath and I climbed into the compartment, then pull it shut with a startling bang that seemed to shake the entire train. The thick leather strap would be tugged inwards to raise the window a little, and then slipped over the brass stud so that the window was always slightly ajar. Just as the back door of the house was always open, so the window of the train compartment was never entirely closed, even in the worst of weathers.

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Less than an hour. Here you are.’ She’d reach into her wicker shopping basket and pull out a copy of Robin for my sister and The Children’s Newspaper for me. I didn’t really like it. There were no colour pictures and it was a bit boring, but it was meant to improve my education. On the way home, I might be allowed a copy of Swift – midway in maturity between Robin and Eagle.

  When I got bored, I’d read the adverts in the compartment. ‘Mum, what’s a laxative?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘’Cos it says up there.’ I nodded in the direction of the advert.

  ‘It helps you go when you can’t.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It just does.’

  ‘What do you do with it?’

  ‘You drink it.’

  ‘The whole bottle?’

  ‘No. You’d be in trouble if you did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Look, why don’t you just read your newspaper, we’ll be there soon.’

  But I was bored with my newspaper, and it seemed to me that Mum and Dad were sometimes a bit impatient of my questions if, as they said, they bought the newspaper to help improve my education; to make me more curious. Dad had got quite irritated when I’d asked him what a midwife was. He said I’d already asked him once. I couldn’t remember. I must have forgotten.

  I looked out of the window at the trains – they were much more exciting, especially when one thundered by on the track right next to us.

  The carriages themselves were cream at the top and maroon at the bottom, and, inside, the compartments were panelled with dark wood. There was a mirror for Mum to check her hair in before we got off, and a knotted string rack for luggage. The seats had really strong springs that you could bounce on when Mum wasn’t looking. They smelled funny, though, and if you hit one hard,
it would release a cloud of dust that would glint in the shafts of sunlight that shone in through the window.

  If the wind was in the right direction, some of the smoke would blow in from the engine. When it did, Mum would pull the window up on the offending side and lower the other one, in between reading her romance. Mum read romances with pink and pale-blue covers, and Dad read Westerns written by people with funny names like Shane and Clint. The Cruel Sea was on our small bookshelf at home, but I never saw him read it. There was also a book called The Knave of Diamonds by Ethel M. Dell, which Mum told me never to touch ‘because it isn’t suitable for a boy’. I took it down one day when she was out, but I couldn’t find anything remotely exciting between its covers. I decided she was right.

  When Dad came with us, in between reading his Western, he’d look out of the window with me to see if we could see any interesting trains – what Johnny Williams called ‘namers’. Sometimes they would be painted dark green or maroon and they looked much smarter than the sooty black jobs that did the usual run to Leeds and back with carriages or freight.

  The longest journey we ever did was to London when we went to Southampton to see Dad’s best man. We swapped trains at Leeds and Dad heaved the single expanding case up on to the luggage rack while Mum handed round the magazines and books. The Children’s Newspaper, she knew, would not be enough to see me through this journey, so there was a colouring book, too, and a book all about transport. On the back page of this book, which I had had for about a year now, was a picture of an engine that had become my favourite. It had sleek lines, was painted in a unique shade of sky blue, and was called Mallard.

  ‘Do you think we’ll see it on the way?’ I asked Dad.

  ‘I don’t know, Algy. We might. It runs on the Leeds to London line.’

  ‘We might, then?’

  ‘We might. But not for long – it’s the quickest train there is. I think it holds the record.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Going fast.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  Mum settled down with her romance, Dad with his Western, and Kath with Robin. I remained glued to the window for mile after mile. To no avail. There was not the merest sniff of Mallard. I looked again at the picture of the sleek engine on the back of the book and sighed.

  ‘How long will it take?’

  Dad looked up. ‘A long time yet.’

  The egg sandwiches came out around Derby. And the Thermos flask of milky coffee with the greaseproof paper round the cork that had replaced the lost stopper.

  Then there was an apple. And a Penguin biscuit. And then there was nothing to do but go on looking.

  Five hours later we pulled into King’s Cross.

  ‘At least we’re not late,’ murmured Dad. But there was still no sign of Mallard.

  ‘Never mind, Algy.’ Dad lifted me up on to his knee. ‘Perhaps we’ll see it on the way back.’

  I wasn’t hopeful, and I didn’t fancy another five hours of gazing out of a grimy window in the hope of a one-second glimpse of the fastest train in the country.

  Dad heaved the case down from the luggage rack, and Mum helped Kath and me down on to the platform. Weary and disappointed, I trailed after Dad, who was now well into his customary holiday walk – the lopsided one with the heavy case in one hand and the tickets and the mac in the other, his flat cap tilted over his right eye.

  As we neared the front of the train, we could see the clouds of steam and smoke that billowed from our equally weary engine, and as they cleared and the locomotive became more visible, Dad put down his case and said, ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered!’

  There, in front of us, was Mallard, spitting and sighing and pausing for breath. The reason we had not seen her was that she was pulling us.

  I don’t remember saying anything at all. Just staring at the sky-blue engine with its sloping black front, and the cab that seemed to be high up in the air. I waved at the driver and he waved back and gave me a wink. Then he looked at his watch and shouted down, ‘Quick enough for you?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  I told Johnny Williams about it when I got back.

  ‘Mallard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pulled you to London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucky bugger.’ And then he went on scoring lines through the numbers he’d logged that weekend: 45394, 45395 …

  I’ve always preferred letters to numbers myself.

  From up on the moors, I can see Addingham away to the left (whose pubs stayed open a full half-hour after those in Ilkley closed), and just round the bend in the valley, and further up it, is the market town of Skipton, ‘the Gateway to the Dales’ – a claim that has always irritated me. The implication being that Ilkley hasn’t quite made it inside. Between Skipton and Ilkley are the villages of Burnsall and Bolton Abbey, Grassington and Kettlewell, Appletreewick and Barden – all of them beauty spots to be visited on Sunday afternoons once Dad had got a van and could take us out on a ‘run’.

  ‘Come on, Algy. And bring the cushions.’ The cushions were snatched from the settee for me and my sister to sit on in the back of the second van we had – a Mini pick-up. There was room only for Dad and Mum in the front of this one. Kath and I sat with our backs to the cab under the canvas awning that kept off the worst of the weather, but sucked in most of the exhaust fumes. There were no seat belts; we just steadied ourselves with our arms when he went round a corner a bit fast.

  Domestic Offices

  Barring the flowering currant bush outside the back door, which Dad cut into an orderly cube each summer for fear it should get ‘out of hand’, the garden at the back of Nelson Road was Mum’s domain. Not that she was especially adventurous. Outside the back door, the bikes would lean against the house wall under an old pram cover or a bit of threadbare stair carpet. The rough lane known as the back would be crossed to reach the garden, which was up a few steps on the other side of a broken gate attached to the midden – the stone-built shed with a split barn door covered in flaking maroon paint. It must, originally, have been the outside toilet, though the house did have indoor sanitation when we arrived. This original use would make sense of the fact that we never used it, even for storage, and that as kids we were banned, by Mum, from even opening the door. Whenever we were emboldened to enquire why it was out of bounds, she’d say there was a particularly nasty sort of spider in there and that if you went in, you would probably catch a disease. I was always a bit wary of it. My mother’s warnings clearly had the desired effect.

  The garden would have won no prizes for design. There was a rectangle of grass (‘lawn’ would be too grand a word) that was cut with a clanking side-wheeled lawnmower on Saturday afternoons in the summer, when Dad came home from work at noon. There was never a grass box, so clippings were forever being brought into the house.

  ‘Who’s come in without wiping their feet?’ my mother would wail, shaking out the rag rug into the yard. The garden was primarily a place to stand the pram, and where washing could be dried on the line that was held up with a long wooden prop. Monday was washing day, when the peggy tub would be pulled out, the house would be filled with steam and the smell of starch and soapsuds, and Mum would bash the dirt out of Dad’s collars and navy-blue overalls with the help of a washboard and elbow grease. Until we got the washer.

  It was a single tub with an agitator in the side, but you could plug it in and let it do the bashing of the collars for you (once you’d rubbed a bit of Fairy soap on them for added cleanliness). It stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and bubbled away under its smart aluminium lid for the duration of the wash. Then Mum would switch it off and haul out the sodden clothes, dashing with them to the sink, where they’d be rinsed, while the washer itself was emptied via the length of hose attached to it into a bucket. The trick was to get the clothes into the clean water in the sink at the same time as the washer was emptying without letting the bucket overflow.

  S
weat would pour down Mum’s brow from under the scarf that was fastened round her head.

  ‘Pull the pipe out, Sparrow – it’s nearly full!’

  I’d hold up the pipe so that no more water would flow, and learned, at my mother’s knee, before I went to school, the siphoning principle.

  All the women in the street would do their washing on the same day, and to get back home from school you’d have to duck under row after row of sheets and pillowcases, shirts and socks, and the hefty knickers of elderly ladies who lived on their own. We had a lot of them, but the one we knew best was Cookie, who lived next door.

  It was Cookie who came to the rescue on the day of the disaster, but she came too late.

  At the age of three or four, mobile but still relatively unsteady, I reached up to the kitchen worktop to grab a handle that I could see from below. It was the handle of a coffee pot. It was full and, deaf to my mother’s cry to leave it alone, I pulled it towards me. It came and so did the contents – boiling-hot milky coffee streamed down my right side.

  In a fit of panic Mum rushed to the sink, pulled off my shirt and grabbed a towel, which she wrapped round me.

  ‘Cookie, Cookie!’ she cried through the open back door.

  ‘What is it, duck?’ The old lady bustled in.

  ‘He’s just scalded himself – what do I do?’

  ‘Get him to the Coronation, duck.’

  The Coronation Hospital was a mile away on the other side of the railway, but I was dashed there with all speed – over the railway bridge and up the lane.

  The doctor shook his head. ‘Who put the towel on him?’

  My mother confessed.

  ‘Worst thing you could have done. It’ll take the skin off.’

  And it did. In one large sheet. I still bear the scars below my right arm. After siphoning, lesson number two was that you don’t put fabric on a scald. Cold water is better.