Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  ‘All you have to do is eat three maggots,’ said Tommy.

  ‘I’m not eating any maggots!’ I cried.

  ‘You ’ave to,’ said Tommy.

  ‘Well, I’m not!’

  ‘Come on,’ said Simon, ‘we’ve all had to do it.’

  ‘Well, I’m not!’

  ‘Then you can’t be in our gang,’ announced Tommy firmly.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jimmy in a friendly voice, ‘we’ve all ’ad to do it. Gerrem down ya.’

  I gritted my teeth and forced my lips together but fingers were pushing in a maggot. It was soft and squelchy. My mouth filled with saliva and I poked the maggot to the side of my mouth. Then another was posted through my lips and another.

  I felt I was going to be sick. The thought of those pale, wriggly maggots in my mouth made my gorge rise.

  ‘Swallow ’em,’ urged Tommy.

  In one great gulp, they were gone.

  ‘He has passed the third test,’ announced Tommy.

  The blindfold was taken off and hands were patting my back and telling me, ‘Well done.’ I felt a warm glow come over me.

  Tommy held up a small furry toy rabbit. ‘There’s your dead rat,’ he said, chuckling.

  Simon held up a Heinz Baked Beans tin.

  I cannot describe the relief at seeing what I had been eating. They were not maggots at all but three baked beans. Of course when you were blindfolded and your imagination was working overtime it was easy to convince yourself that they were real maggots you had swallowed.

  I sat in the hay and laughed and laughed and that started everyone else off laughing too.

  ‘So I was eating beans,’ I said, lying back and staring up at the roof of the barn. ‘Baked beans.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Simon.

  ‘The beans in the tin,’ I said. ‘I thought they were real maggots.’

  ‘You’re daft, you,’ said Tommy.

  ‘Well, I was blindfolded,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t see what I was eating.’

  ‘No, I mean, you’re daft,’ he repeated. ‘We just collected the maggots in the bean tin.’

  It’s a wonder that those of us growing up in the fifties managed to survive. We jumped off walls, climbed trees, wrestled on the damp grass, threw stones at cans, lit fires, fenced like knights of old, with switches cut from the great weeping willow tree by the pond, fished for tiddlers in muddy streams, swung across rivers on a rope fastened to a branch, drank water from a garden hose, shot each other with potato guns and catapults, played marbles in the dirt, chewed sticky toffee, and then returned home for deep-fried fish and chips, with bread and butter, stodgy puddings and mugs of tea with three spoonfuls of sugar in. We had never heard the phrases ‘health and safety’ and ‘high in saturated fats and carbohydrates’.

  The building site on Moorgate where the large detached houses on the Duke of Norfolk Estate were being built was the finest playground a child could ever wish for. Saturday and Sunday afternoons were the best times, when there were no workmen about to chase you away – only a bad-tempered watchman who spent a deal of his time sleeping in his little hut. His guard dog, a fat, lazy and stupid old labrador called Laddie, which, like its master, enjoyed lengthy naps, occasionally roused itself to give a single bark before slumping back into its somnolent posture. On the site, well away from the watchman’s hut, there were cement mixers to climb into, mountains of sand to run up and down, bags of cement to jump on and create explosions of grey dust, nuts and bolts to lob, buckets full of slimy water to throw, ladders to scale, planks to balance on, ropes to swing on and scaffolding to climb up. It was much more fun than playing in Clifton Park. If I were to visit such a building site today I would have to wear a hard hat and a yellow jacket and sign some sort of indemnity. As children we would spend hours in this ‘playground’ and return home weary and grubby, with nothing but a scraped knee or a bruised shin to show for it.

  At Archer’s Farm we would help feed the hens, muck out the pigs, collect the eggs, ride on the back of the tractor, watch the cows being milked, cut down the swathes of stinging nettles, pretending they were ranks of enemy soldiers and, above all, stay away from Gertie, the old grey goose which would honk and chase you, neck forward, beak open, wings flapping. There was an old crossbred sheepdog which would follow us around, and a yapping three-legged Jack Russell terrier, appropriately named Jackie. A clouder of feral cats inhabited the barn and would catch the fat black rats and little fieldmice, and hiss and snarl and arch their backs if we came anywhere near. Both dogs and cats, very wisely, avoided Gertie. I much preferred to be inside the barn, that huge, shadowy, hay-smelling, mys terious place piled high with straw bales and full of strange rustlings. We would lug the bales around and make tunnels and caves; we would leap from the upper floor on to a mountain of soft hay or watch the cats stalking the rats.

  Mr Archer, the farmer, was a small grizzled man of few words, with a sad countenance. He had a broken nose, a weather-reddened face and eyes as grey as the ocean on a winter’s day. Invariably he wore old green overalls, heavy boots and a flat cap, oily and frayed, the inner rim blackened by dirt and sweat. His pronounced limp, it was rumoured, was the result of his tussle with Moses, the 750-kilo bull that roamed the top field. The great Friesian creature had, so the story goes, knocked him down, tossed him in the air, pummelled him with its head, caught his side with its horn and broken the farmer’s leg and two of his ribs. He was very wary, as we all were, of this proud and fierce animal. Sometimes we would tease Moses, running across the side of the field, a good distance away, willing him to chase us, and when he did we would scream in fright as he pounded down the field. We would leap over the five-bar gate and watch fascinated as he charged right up to us before swerving away, snorting and bellowing and shivering with fury.

  Of all the animals, I liked the pigs the best. ‘A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you,’ Mr Archer once told me when I was helping him to muck out the sties, ‘but a pig, he looks you straight in the eye.’ I learnt quite a deal about these intelligent creatures on those Saturday visits to Archer’s Farm, for instance that they are essentially clean animals which defecate where they get water and leave the rest of the pen dry for sleeping.

  Mr Archer never appeared particularly pleased to see this motley gang of boys appearing in the farmyard, but he never thought of us as nuisances and never told us to ‘Clear Off!’ or ‘Play up your own end!’ as so many adults did.

  ‘Tha can collect eggs, if tha wants,’ he would say morosely, or ‘Them tools could do wi’ a bit of a clean, if tha’s a mind,’ or ‘T’cats need summat to eat,’ or ‘It’s gerrin dark, gerroff hooame.’ None of us liked one job the farmer asked us to do – to hold up the cow’s tail when he was milking. Those of us who were commissioned to take on this potentially hazardous task were in fear that the restless bovine might decide to perform at the very moment when we were holding its tail aloft. It never happened, of course, but the fear was always there.

  Sometimes I would go up to Archer’s Farm by myself. I enjoyed the company of others but took pleasure in my own company too and enjoyed solitary walks in the park, the quiet of the public library in town and the peace and solitude on a crisp sunny day away from the smoke and grime of Rotherham. I would lie face down on the soft grass with a book, feeling the heat of the sun on the back of my neck, the smell of earth and grass in my nostrils and only the sounds of birds and insects around me. I would look up to see the swallows swooping and darting around their nests below the eaves of the old barn and watch the lazy-looking cows in the field beyond. The three-legged Jack Russell would sometimes find me out and snuggle up to me, but apart from my canine companion I was left in peace and could lose myself in my book. There in the sunshine I would read The Red Badge of Courage, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Last of the Mohicans and everything seemed right with the world. As darkness gathered I would watch the rooks, some settling to roost in the sycamores, others flapping above the trees, circ
ling and floating on the evening air like scraps of black cloth, or I would watch the rabbits bolting across the fields when they caught sight of me, their white tails bobbing. Then I would head off home, saying goodbye to Mr Archer on the way. ‘Tha’s off then?’ he would say. He was a man of few words.

  Only twice did I see Mr Archer show any real emotion. Once, when he came upon the chicken coop and found a fox had got in, he plucked his cap from his head and threw it to the ground angrily. Then he sat on an upturned orange box and surveyed the carnage, shaking his head. The fox had bitten off the heads of all the chickens and tossed the carcasses aside. Some townsfolk think foxes are rather attractive, elegant creatures, with their russet coats and bushy tails, but I learnt early on that they are vicious and dedicated predators and kill for the sake of it. Another time he lost his temper was when the cockerel went for him. The cockerel, called Jock, had a habit of appearing from nowhere and running up squawking madly with its wings flapping and its beak thrust forward. One day it picked the wrong moment to go for Mr Archer. When it rushed up to him in a flurry of wings, crowing frantically, the farmer lifted up his heavily booted foot and gave it an almighty kick which sent the bird flying through the air.

  ‘That’s the last bloody time it’ll gu fer me,’ he announced, and picking up the dead bird he added, ‘And t’bugger will be in t’pot toneet.’

  There was an old air raid shelter in one of the fields, and some of my happiest times were spent hiding in the smelly half-light among the discarded beer cans and soggy cigarette packets, pretending that the Gestapo (two of my pals) were looking for me. Just before dusk we would light a fire and roast potatoes that we never ate.

  One day two friends and I found a large chest full of tools underneath a piece of old carpet in the air raid shelter. Mr Archer left his milking to examine our find and declared that the chest was probably stolen and had been hidden here by the thieves, who would return later to retrieve it. He would contact the police. The following week the Rotherham Advertiser printed a short paragraph relating how a group of children had discovered a cache of stolen tools. Our names were printed, and a commendation for our good sense. I was described as twelve-year-old Gervaisse Finn. Not only had the reporter spelt my name incorrectly, he had also added a couple of years on my age. This was an early realization that those who write for newspapers frequently get their facts wrong and that one should be sceptical about what is written by reporters.

  I liked fishing for newts and sticklebacks, minnows and the ugly bull-headed fish at Whiston Meadows with my brother Alec, and flying my bright yellow box kite at Boston Park. I liked visiting Clifton Park Museum to see the great stuffed lion in the glass case dominating the entrance and the case-upon-case of birds’ eggs all arranged in neat rows. We rarely went into the long room with the priceless collection of Rockingham pottery. At the very top of the winding staircase a stuffed golden eagle had pride of place, a bloody rabbit clutched in its bright yellow claws. The curator, as I recall, wasn’t as tolerant of boys as Mr Archer. He would watch us keenly with eyes like the stuffed golden eagle, shushing us if we spoke too loudly. He was clearly very relieved when we left and he could settle down again to the cool peace and tranquillity in his small office in the marble-floored building.

  Some Saturdays I would meet my friends at the New Baths on Sheffield Road. These were bigger, better and cleaner than the old baths where I went with my father. The floors and walls were tiled, there were showers and clean cubicles and the toilets didn’t smell. As you paid your money to get in you were given a sort of large blunt nappy pin with a small key attached which you fastened to your swimming trunks. The greatest attraction of the New Baths was the diving blocks and boards. There was a long diving board with an adjustable roller and a diving block, and we spent most of the session jumping, plunging and bombing in an explosion of water. Sometimes a show-off would demonstrate a perfect dive from the very top block, surfacing to swim serenely to the side. I once tried to dive from the second block but landed flat on the water – the dreaded belly flop. I submerged in a rush of bubbles and spluttering, choking, drowning, I madly thrashed to the side thinking my stomach had been split open. I was sent out to get dressed by the attendant for acting the fool. Once I was dared to climb the steps to the highest block – a square flat platform with metal railings – and to jump off. Halfway up I got cold feet but there was no turning back, for a queue had formed behind me. With stomach churning, I edged to the end of the platform. The rectangle of pale blue water seemed miles down. I was terrified. Of course there were stories of boys who had plummeted from the top block and broken their necks, others who had cracked their heads on the bottom and drowned, which made the ordeal more terrifying. I stood there for five minutes considering what to do.

  ‘Are tha goin’ to jump, or what?’ asked a boy half my size, who stood with his arms folded over his skinny chest. Behind him was a group of impatient boys. I had an audience. I stepped off the platform and, with eyes firmly closed, hit the water with an almighty crash and surfaced to the cheers of my friends. The following week I was with the best of them, running across the top platform and launching myself into the water with abandon.

  My mother and father never seemed concerned about my safety unless I arrived home after the appointed hour, and then I would be in real trouble. They were not timid, anxious, risk-averse parents and no one harked on incessantly about health and safety and the perils of the wider world. Those days were so different. Parents didn’t worry about where you were, who you were with, what you were doing, and never imagined that predatory paedophiles were lurking around every corner and behind every bush. It wasn’t as if they didn’t care about us. They belonged to the wartime generation and had lived through dangerous times, seen houses crumble before them, gas pipes split open, burst water mains, mounds of rubble, and perhaps understood the child’s need for adventure and challenge. Amazingly, in all those early years, apart from a few scrapes and scratches, I never hurt myself and was never approached by the stereotypical ‘dirty old man in a raincoat’.

  29

  When my children were growing up they must have been heartily tired of me telling them about my happy childhood, without all the films with special effects and fancy Disneyworld holidays, exciting computer games and sophisticated toys, expensive trainers and designer T-shirts. As a teenager, when asked to write a GCSE history assignment about the society in which his parents grew up, Richard, my eldest son, challenged me robustly about those halcyon days of my youth, that idyllically happy and peaceful time when smiling bobbies walked the beat, everyone was friendly and courteous, neighbours popped in for a cup of tea and a chat, children were well-behaved and could spell and punctuate properly, where there were no football hooligans, graffiti artists, litter louts, terrorists and paedophiles and we were happy with the simple things of life (and still get change from a ha’penny).

  Some say that the mind has a great facility for retaining and exaggerating happy memories of childhood and erasing the more distressing and disturbing ones, that we choose not to remember those occasions when we were unhappy or depressed, we lock these out and tend to look back on a Golden Age which never really existed. Some might say that nostalgia is a form of homesickness, that our memories have been warped into a yearning for a previous life when everything was less complicated and stress-free. George Orwell wrote that ‘only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child’s vision of the world’.

  Maybe my remembrance of childhood is somewhat distorted. As my son reminded me, surely everything wasn’t as perfect when I was a child as I imagined it to be. Children then, as now, he argued, took no great interest in the national and international events, they didn’t listen to the news on the radio or read the depressing accounts in the daily papers; they were far too interested in playing out with their friends, going to the cinema, watching television and all the other things that youngsters like to do. While I might go some way to agr
eeing with him, I still feel that for me, it certainly seemed a far more peaceful, simpler and carefree world that I inhabited as a child than the one in which I live now. Of course I remember significant events: the 1958 air crash which killed seven Manchester United Players – the ‘Busby Babes’– and three staff members, the assassination of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King, something about the Suez Canal debacle and a man called Nasser and the Bay of Pigs crisis and Mr Khrushchev, but not a whole lot else. There were the terrible Moors Murders, of course, but they stood out in their stark and unbelievable horror and brutality. Life in the 1950s and 60s no doubt had its darker side, but it was not a world where a nail bomb is placed in the Admiral Duncan public house to kill people whose only crime was to be gay, where a deranged man shoots dead sixteen children and a teacher in Dunblane, where an aeroplane full of innocent people is blown from the skies above Lockerbie, where a guntoting madman wreaks havoc in Hungerford, where racist thugs set upon and kill a black boy standing at a bus stop, where a headmaster is stabbed to death outside his school, where twenty-nine people are blown to pieces as they are going about their shopping in Omagh, where a family doctor called Harold Shipman systematically murders his patients, where two ten-year-olds drag the toddler Jamie Bulger to a railway line to kill him, where two little girls are murdered by the school caretaker, where Sarah Payne’s short life is ended by an evil predator and where suicide bombers on a London tube train claim fifty-two innocent lives and maim countless others. I can’t recall such a catalogue of horror when I was young.

  Things for an ordinary little boy growing up in Rotherham seemed so sunny and uncomplicated, and I, like all my friends, did indeed find pleasure in simple things. Games seemed to change as the seasons changed. In summer the boys in the street were out early on Saturday morning on the bit of dusty, uncultivated ground at the top of Ramsden Road playing ‘taws’, and with a bag of marbles we would play until it got to dinnertime. Girls liked skipping and pushing their toy prams or dressing up. There were games that both boys and girls played, and we were all keen on the fads like pogo-sticks, hula hoops, yo-yos, whips and spinning tops, but peashooters and potato guns were the preserve of the boys and no girls were allowed to play the rough games like British Bulldog.