The additional perk was that both Mickey’s parents worked – his mum, Dorothy, in a newsagent and his dad, Stan, in a greengrocer’s, so there was never anyone around to say no.
As parents go, Mickey’s seemed amazingly relaxed compared with mine. They never enquired what he had been doing all day. They also seemed better off. They smoked Kensitas cigarettes, and collected the coupons; as a result of which, Mickey and his sister, Janet, always seemed to have new bikes. I tried to persuade my dad to change brands, but he wouldn’t. He said he preferred Senior Service, and anyway, Mum thought gift coupons were a bit suspicious. You never got something for nothing, she said. But the bikes seemed real enough to me.
We rode down to the land at the back of the salerooms on them – he on his Raleigh Palm Beach, and me on my little maroon Hercules that we’d got from someone in the scout group who’d grown out of it. We parked the bikes by the railings and sneaked through a gap in the wire netting into the area known as Mennell’s Yard.
We weren’t really supposed to be in there – it was a builder’s yard full of piles of sand and aggregate; sacks of hardened cement that they couldn’t be bothered to throw away and broken paving slabs. The men came in the morning to load up their lorry and van, but they were usually gone by nine o’clock, so we had the place to ourselves.
We could sculpt massive desert scenes in the pile of sand and take our model soldiers there to stage battles between the British army and Rommel’s Afrika Korps, until I got fed up with always being German and arranged for a landslide to engulf the lot.
Along one side of the yard was an open-sided shed covered in corrugated iron. It was used by the salerooms as a dumping ground for stuff that was broken or too shoddy even to be sold in a job lot; the junk from house clearances that nobody would give even a tanner for. As I said, we weren’t really supposed to be in there, but John Freeman and Teddy Woodrup, the only folk likely to disturb us, turned a blind eye, as long as we didn’t make too much noise or cause too much trouble. When the yard was empty, we could do what we liked.
‘Look over here …’ Mickey was crouching over an old tea chest. It was full of wood wool. ‘This’ll do as kindling.’
‘We can’t start a fire here.’ I heard the words of caution coming out of my mouth and felt a bit lame.
‘Not here. Back in the garden, daft bugger. Stuff some in your pockets.’
So I did. Then I climbed a pile of broken floor tiles that started slithering to the ground in a ceramic avalanche.
‘Shurrup! They’ll hear us.’
I came down gingerly and went to explore another corner of the shed. I found two things: an old bentwood chair with a cane seat that had collapsed and the top half of a statue of a knight on horseback.
‘Here! Look at this!’ I called Mickey over.
‘Aw, wow!’
‘Good i’n’t it!’
Mickey lifted it out of my hands. ‘It’s heavy. It must be made of lead. You know what you can do with lead?’
‘What?’
‘You can melt it and make it into other things.’
‘Shall we take it?’
Mickey looked around. ‘Yeah. It’s broken. It’s just been chucked away. Nobody’ll want it.’
I couldn’t argue. The statue, which looked like a poor copy of the Anglia television knight in shining armour, was only about six inches high, and the bottom half of the horse was missing. It had obviously been dumped. So, too, had the chair. Aside from the missing seat, it was also suffering from woodworm. One of the legs was about to fall off.
Mickey took the knight, and I took the chair, and we cycled the hundred yards or so back to his garden as nonchalantly as we could.
Once there, we unloaded our plunder and set to to make the fire. There were plenty of places to choose from. There were no obvious flower beds or borders, not even an obvious lawn. There would be patches where, when the mood took him, Mickey would fork over a bit of the black, ash-filled soil, surround the irregular-shaped bed with broken bricks and small boulders yielded during the culti vation of the earth, and sow clarkia or marigolds, godetia or love-in-a-mist, but that was during the summer months; at other times of year the ground was a featureless wasteland, interrupted only by a few clumps of nettles and the finest stand of Japanese knotweed in the street. Its hollow stems made great pea-shooters. But today we had other fish to fry.
We settled on a spot of flattened mud roughly halfway down the garden. The wood wool was piled up and a couple of broken Fyffe’s banana boxes filched from the outhouse where Stan Hudson kept his rejects.
We cracked the thin timber over our knees and piled it on the wood wool, then we went inside the house to look for matches. Mickey found some on the mantelpiece, along with a packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you want one?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘I’ve got these …’ He offered me another box of cigarettes. Sweet ones, made of sugar icing, with pink ends. At the age of eight or nine they seemed preferable to the real thing, and we stuck them in our mouths and leaned on the mantelpiece, pretending to smoke and to swear as best we could.
‘Bloody buggers,’ said Mickey.
‘Bloody buggering buggers,’ I responded.
We amused ourselves for ten minutes or so like this, pretending to be old men, tired of life and cursing everything around us, until our cigarettes had been munched down to the stubs. Then we swallowed our fag ends and went out with the matches to light our fire.
It took hold straightaway, the flames fanned by a gentle breeze. Soon, the banana crates were ashes, and we needed thicker timber to keep the fire alight. We hauled a couple of old tree stumps from the bottom of the privet hedge and lobbed them into the middle of the dying flames so that a plume of sparks shot up into the sky. They must have been quite dry, because they took hold quickly, and we warmed ourselves by the flames.
Soon, even they had died down, and Mickey suggested that the embers were now hot enough to melt the lead. He found an old paint tin, still encrusted with the green colouring of their back door, and set it on the hot fire bed, watching the remains of the paint bubbling and sizzling in the bottom of the tin. Eventually, when the paint had turned to ashes, he lifted up the battered knight and dropped it into the tin. Miraculously, before our eyes, the dull grey soldier began to melt and turned, instead, to shining liquid.
‘It’s not lead,’ I offered, ‘it’s silver!’
‘Nah!’ said Mickey, clearly experienced in lead foundry. ‘It always does that. It’s just molten lead.’
I was enormously impressed at his knowledge, especially when he fetched an empty baked-bean tin from their outhouse. With the aid of a couple of sticks he managed to pour the molten lead from the larger can into the smaller one, which he used as a mould, and a few minutes later he tipped out a perfect cylinder of shiny lead.
‘That’s magic!’ I said, scared of Mickey’s alchemy, if I was honest, but also deeply impressed.
We kicked the lead ingot around a bit until it cooled, then lifted it and marvelled at its weight in relation to its bulk. And then we got bored.
The fire was still glowing, and the broken chair was lying unused a few feet away.
I saw Mickey’s mind whirring. ‘You know that film we saw at the flicks on Saturday?’
I shook my head.
‘Aw, no. You di’n’t cum, did you?’
‘No.’ I never went to the pictures on a Saturday afternoon. Not unless it was raining. My mum wouldn’t let me. ‘Go out and get some fresh air. You don’t want to be stuck in there when it’s fine.’
And I didn’t, to be honest; I’d rather be out playing – down by the river or in the garden or the woods. But it was easier to say that my mum wouldn’t let me – that way, they’d be sympathetic, rather than having a go.
‘Well, any road, there were this cowboy, and he were tryin’ to rescue this girl from this baddy, and the baddy ties him to a chair and lights a fire under it.’
I could see wher
e the conversation was leading.
‘Did he escape?’
‘Oh, yeah. He just wriggled about a bit while the flames were sort of lickin’ up’ is legs and eventually they burned through the rope and he got away.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you fancy tryin’ it?’
I knew what the answer was before I asked the question. ‘Who goes in the chair?’
Mickey found the rope in the outhouse along with the broken banana crates and the old paint tins, as I knew he would. He tied my feet securely to the legs of the chair and bound my hands behind me on the bentwood frame.
Obediently I helped him position me in the centre of the fire by shuffling forward into the middle of the hot ashes, and like a Yorkshire version of Joan of Arc, I pretended to struggle as the newly fuelled flames licked around the chair legs. The rope did catch fire, and so did the legs of the chair, but because the timing had not been orchestrated by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the rope didn’t give way and within a few minutes the flames were spreading to the broken cane seat and licking round the seat of my pants. I tried to move, but realised that if the chair toppled, I would fall headlong into the flames. I had to be hauled from the fire by Mickey, who grabbed the back of the chair just as the broken leg collapsed, but mercifully before my trousers were alight. He beat out the flames with an old curtain that he found in the hedge bottom.
I escaped with nothing more than melted soles on my shoes, and clothing that smelled like a kipper. I might not have got the girl, but like the goody in the film, I had cheated the flames, if not in quite such an heroic fashion.
At any rate, Mickey seemed impressed. I’d never seen him looking so worried. We said goodbye at his garden gate. I thought he looked paler than usual.
I didn’t tell my mum what had happened. I said that Mr Hudson had been having a bonfire and that we’d been helping him and that was why my clothes smelled of smoke.
She wasn’t impressed. ‘Why he has to have so many fires I don’t know. He’s only got a small garden, and anyway, there’s never anything in it.’
I didn’t reply. I was happy to have got away with it. It never occurred to me that I’d actually been lucky to get away with my life. But more importantly, Mum never did find out.
I promised myself that I would do two things before I was forty – learn to play the piano and ride a horse. On the first count I failed. I did make an attempt to become a pianist, but after six months of lessons my teacher moved away (she swore it was nothing to do with my progress) and I never got round to enlisting the help of another. Four chords and what my dad used to call: ‘Oh, can you wash my father’s shirt; oh, can you wash it clean; oh, can you wash my father’s shirt and hang it on the line’ are my only party pieces. There is not much call for them.
But I did learn to ride, and even jump a little, on a wonderful sixteen-hand grey ex-team chaser called Thistle. I don’t ride very often now, but there is little to compare with the thrill of kicking a horse into a gallop at the bottom of a field of stubble and clinging on for dear life with your heels and your head down.
Since being a lad, I’ve had a love affair with horses – in paint and in the flesh. The works of George Stubbs and Sir Alfred Munnings thrill me like no others. Dogs command affection, cats command attention, but horses command respect.
’Osses
Cars might have been a rarity in our street, but there were plenty of them in the town: luxurious Humbers and modest Standard Eights, Austin Cambridges and Morris Oxfords, sit-up-and-beg Ford Populars and elegant Wolseleys – the only car that had ‘its name up in lights’, with a little illuminated badge at the top of the radiator grill.
Old Mr Spooner, who looked like Winston Churchill and even smoked a fat cigar, was driven to his little factory at the top of Brewery Road in a black Rolls Royce. He sat in the back, swamped by a big black overcoat with an astrakhan collar, the eyes in his round, white head peering through thick horn-rimmed spectacles. Nobody envied him the car; it just seemed oddly out of place in Ilkley. I mean, why would you want a Rolls Royce just to ride to the top of Brewery Road? You might just as well walk.
My dad, who rode to work on his big black bike with his tool bag balanced on the crossbar, was always desperate for a Rover 90 – like Miss Coffey, the Brown Owl of the local Brownie pack. He never got one. He had to settle, eventually, for an Austin A55 pick-up van, and we all four piled on to the front bench seat. The Mini pick-up that followed resulted in Kath and me being relegated to the back. Miss Coffey lived up Curly Hill and came from a family with private means. As a plumber, Dad’s means were more public. But he could dream.
As Miss Coffey cruised by, waving politely from the high driving seat, my father would touch his cap and gaze dreamily in the direction of the thin wisp of blue-grey exhaust until the car purred out of sight. Dad would have loved a car that purred; instead, he ended up with one that grunted.
Cars excited me as much as any lad in the 1950s, but the things that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end were the horses. There weren’t many of them, but those that trotted into my life made a big impression.
At the bottom of Nelson Road is Little Lane. It’s more of a road than a lane, really, and destined in a few hundred yards to turn into the more salubrious-sounding Valley Drive – a more suitable name for a road in Ben Rhydding. At its junction with Nelson Road was Little Lane Garage. This wasn’t a flashy filling station with illuminated petrol pumps; it was a workaday repair shop with huge sliding doors of green-painted corrugated iron. It was here that the broken-down Standard Eights and old Ford Pops were taken to be mended; the Humbers and the Wolseleys would go to Ross’s Garage in Ben Rhydding – the only Rolls Royce dealer for miles around, and the supplier of Mr Spooner’s gleaming limousine.
The towering doors of Little Lane Garage were heaved open in the morning and stayed that way until early evening, during which time fountains of sparks from the welding equipment would shower out on to the pavement to the alarm of passers-by, who would skip smartly sideways to avoid lasting damage.
Behind the garage was a small alley. It was unmade and scattered along its sides were assorted lumps of scrap iron and rusting mudguards, old cartwheels and oil drums. They’d been there so long that tall grass grew up between them, and slicks of oily water snaked across the black, compacted earth. If you walked past this cavalcade of cast-offs, side-stepping the slippery slicks, you would come to a large black shed – the blacksmith’s forge, where the furnace roared and the bellows belched from dawn till dusk.
Sam Rayner was a big man with a massive leather apron. His face was the colour of pale leather, and his brow would run with sweat. His cap – once tweed – was now the texture of greasy canvas and flattened to his head, and there were black marks round his eyes and smudges on his chin.
I didn’t believe that he had feet. His apron was so long and his walk so loping that I was convinced he had hooves, and that they were probably shod with iron shoes like the clogs my mum used to wear when she worked in the mill before she married.
You’d seldom see him standing. He’d almost always be bent double with his back to the rear end of a horse; the hefty hoof pulled up between his legs as he trimmed its edges or hammered in the nails or deftly twisted off the unwanted ends with some evil-looking tool.
His forge was full of tools. They hung from nails on the beams, and lay in great piles on a bench to the side of the furnace. I’d watch with a gormless stare as he fashioned a shoe from raw metal, pulling it yellow-hot from the furnace in the end of a pair of grips, and beating it into a crescent moon on his anvil – one hard stroke on the horseshoe, one soft stroke on the anvil; one hard stroke on the horseshoe, one soft stroke on the anvil; CLANG-clang, CLANG-clang, CLANG-clang – like church bells. In and out of the furnace the shoe would come, until it was shaped to his liking and he’d hold it against the hoof of the horse to see if it was a perfect fit. This was when the foul-smelling mixture of smoke and steam and burning hoof would fil
l the air, and I’d stuff my snotty hanky over my nose to block it out.
Sam Rayner hardly ever spoke – at least, not to the kids who crowded round his doorway. But he never chased us off; just carried on doing his work until we got bored of watching. The horses came and went, usually without a murmur, but we would flatten ourselves against the side of the shed as they were led away, fearful of a kick in the goolies.
‘Them big ’uns can kick so ’ard that yer bollocks ’ud never come down again,’ said Dokey Gell. We didn’t want to put it to the test.
Riders came from all over the town to have their horses shod at Sam Rayner’s, but I never remember seeing Mrs Briggs there. She drove round the town in a horse and buggy, instead of a car, and was a strange sight, among the rest of the traffic. She had what I think was the most serene and delicate face I have ever seen. It was small, like Mrs Briggs herself, rose pink and fine-featured. Her froth of lightly curled hair was silver grey and she wore fragile-looking rimless spectacles and a blissful smile whatever the weather. She was the most unlikely looking pig-keeper I have ever seen, but from time to time, the buggy would be replaced with a more robust wooden-sided cart into which half a dozen swill-filled metal dustbins would be placed. She would ride in this through the town, and despite the fact that she wore old clothes, black wellingtons that seemed far too big for her and a jacket held in place with string, she looked to me, always, like a refugee from My Fair Lady – a diminutive Queen of Transylvania who just happened to be dressed in rags. Always she smiled absently as she rode by, untainted by the scent of swill she left in her wake.
At the top of Brook Street, the Times Square of Ilkley, was an elaborate fountain composed of prancing white horses. In the early days it shot plumes of water into the air, and while its equine element never ranked with the horses of St Mark’s in Venice, it was, in its own small way, a prominent landmark in the town. Eventually, during the days when it was switched off more often than it was on, someone sneaked out at dead of night and painted it red. It was the beginning of the end, and the fountain and the horses, seen as too great a temptation for vandals, were eventually removed and replaced with an uninspired circular flower bed.
Nobbut a Lad Page 18