Last in the Tin Bath

by David Lloyd

  We used to collect the bottles of Sarsaparilla sold to us by the pop man on his weekly rounds and turn them into hot water bottles to take to bed with us at night. Electric blankets? Bunkum. You would keep filling these things with hot water until they cracked, and only when you were well stocked for bottles did you consider selling your over-supply back to the pop man on his next visit.

  Friday night wasn’t only bath night; it was washing night as well. Mum would wash all our clothes by hand and lay them out to be pulled through the mangle. In later years, as I reached my teens, I became the mangle operator and the prolonged turning of the handle took place in front of the fire while watching our newly acquired television. Seeing Michael Miles present the ITV game show Take Your Pick! dismissed the sense of it being a laborious chore. Contestants could win monetary prizes for answering relatively simple questions, but it was those failing to get through the preliminary round – the ‘Yes-No interlude’ – that got me guffawing.

  A fellow called Bob Danvers-Walker, the voice of Pathé News for four decades, was the show’s announcer, while Alec Dane was effectively the gong of doom for those taking part. Michael Miles would interview the contestants for sixty seconds, with the name of the game being for them to avoid saying yes or no. I would be chortling away to myself as Michael Miles would say such things as, ‘Hello, Richard, is it?’ ‘Yes.’ DONG! Dane would come into his own in a nanosecond, at the slip of the tongue. It was brilliant stuff.

  Last in the tin bath. Stood at the mangle. I knew my place all right. Home life was a strict regime that left me behind my peers in terms of growing up and seeing the real world.

  Ours was a strict household dominated not by my father but my mother. To say I was well disciplined by her would be a bit like saying that Genghis Khan liked a spot of fisticuffs. She had old Genghis’s aggression too. For example, she would think nothing of giving me a whack with the frying pan. In contrast, my dad would never raise a finger against me. I could get a hiding for next to nothing, really. All it took was for her to be that way inclined and woe betide me. On reflection, she must have suffered a few women’s problems, I think, because I always seemed to be going to the corner shop to fetch some pills or other for her. When she wasn’t in the striking mood I could be stood in the corner of the room for hours on end; told to face the wall and not turn around until instructed. People talk of their childhoods being happy. Was mine? Was it hell. I was frightened to death of my mother. She worked at a weaving mill from 7.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week, and my sense of dread only eased when she was sat at a loom rather than at our kitchen table. It was not until I was about eighteen that the fear that she might actually skin me alive passed.

  Unconditionally, I knew my place – move from it and I would be dispatched those few hundred yards to Uncle Harry’s gaff, one of a clutch of family members on the Aspin side to populate Water Street and its environs, to fetch his dreaded sailor’s belt. It seemed to spend as much time on my backside as it did around his waist, and it was always Mum who thrust it there with a flick of the wrist reminiscent of Glenn McGrath propelling a seam-proud delivery down an off-stump line. She administered these lashes with the dedication of an Olympian too. Then, when she had finished this ceremonial beating, I suffered the ignominy of having to shuffle back to Harry’s to return his leather weapon of justice with folk inevitably gawking at me, having heard the commotion from inside number 134. Talk about a bum deal.

  When it came to Fridays, my stock was the equivalent of Albania in the Eurovision Song Contest. I would be bringing up the rear. We were also pretty far down the pecking order when it came to our social status. But like lots of families who grew up in the type of back-to-back cottage we called home, we got on with life. Sure, we had no money to speak of, but neither did the folk around us either. It was a harsh environment to be a part of – getting by was a darned hard slog for most – and that much was evident in the intimidating experience of waiting at the mill for my mother to finish work. The noise emanating from its walls was otherworldly in its volume. It reverberated around your body, and that was when you were stood outside. I couldn’t have imagined having to spend nine and a half hours a day suffering it on the inside. But this was part of life in the Lancashire enclave in which I grew up.

  This was us. Our lot. It never occurred to me that our family was from anywhere else, as we seemed to be and acted like Lancastrians through and through. The clue was in the surname, I guess. It should have given things away – and not been such a surprise to learn – that my grandfather Arthur Lloyd came from Cardiff. He had migrated north to find work in Shropshire, then latterly settled in Accrington.

  He only had one eye, did Arthur. An affliction that didn’t cause any hindrance generally but would prove a bit of a handicap when it came to earning a bob or two. You see, he used to work on the door at the Sydney Street Working Men’s Club, and a prerequisite of the job was to collect payment from patrons on entry. On any given evening things would be fine, but some among the revellers would make it their business to try to sneak in on his blind spot. Cheeky bleeders! There are very few memories for me of one-eyed Arthur because he passed away when I was four, but I retain cartoon-like imaginary visions of him being duped by a stream of likely lads saving on their admission money so they could afford another pint at the bar.

  Dad was a devout Methodist whose beliefs meant he was also a strict teetotaller. He never thrust that upon me, but I did not drink around him in later life as a mark of respect, and wouldn’t have seen the inside of many establishments by the time it was legal for me to be ordering my own pint. At Christmas my mother would make a big sherry trifle, and a second booze-free one for Dad.

  On one side of our family there was Dad, a fairly quiet and reserved army of one. On the other, there was a shedful of Aspins. There were umpteen of them as Mum had thirteen brothers and sisters. A number of my aunties and uncles I never knew, but the Aspins of Accrington hailed from Plantation Street, a rather apt address, the crop they were cultivating clearly being children. Everybody lived within half a mile of each other, with the majority of us in adjacent streets. It was typical, I guess, of many families in northern towns. You could just walk into each other’s houses at any time. In fact, there were so many of the Aspins you could have gone in blindfolded to any given house in Accrington and had a decent chance that it would belong to a relation.

  My maternal grandfather was notorious in the area, and commonly known as Bill o’Moleside, named in recognition of the large hill next to the coppice where they lived. Moleside was so called because it was punctuated with lots of little caverns, as if giant moles had been working overtime on it. At weekends these caverns – referred to by locals as Gamblers’ Caves – would be populated by blokes playing cards and dominoes for money.

  He was a bit of a mover and shaker was Bill and he used to be at the forefront of this amateur casino, playing for ha’pennies and pennies. There were very few television sets around in those days, of course, particularly in areas like ours where money was tight, so Bill clearly got his entertainment from fraternising with fellow card sharps. When he wasn’t out, the evidence presented suggests he was hard at work producing more heirs. No wonder he needed to win a few extra bob come Saturday. There were a lot of mouths to feed.

  Dad started work in that hellish foundry – the unforgiving physicality of which was not something he enjoyed one iota – but ended up with a much more comfortable life for himself as a theatre technician at Accrington Victoria Hospital. For many years, I thought he was the bloke who operated some kind of cinema for convalescents. You know, the fellow that put newly released pictures on. It came as something of a disappointment to learn that he actually worked in the operating theatre, sterilising and disinfecting everything in sight so that surgery could take place.

  He worked at the hospital for thirty-odd years, which added up to a fair amount of experience. As time went by, every now and again he would do an operation himself. Not top-end
stuff like brain surgery or owt like that, mind. No, just the simpler stuff. For example, the full-time surgeons would think nothing of allowing him to whip out an appendix. He would then bring home these worm-shaped trophies, pickle them and place them in jars for display. You could see all the evidence of his handiwork hanging up in his shed.

  From the centre of Accrington, Water Street ran all the way out to the countryside. It was the primary thoroughfare and the route people took to get to Peel Park, then home of the great Accrington Stanley. On Saturday afternoons, I would sit on the front step of our terraced house and watch all the players, followed by supporters an hour or so later, walk past. Living where we did meant I got to know these players, conversing with them as they went by, boots tucked under their arms.

  What bound us all together in those days was that we were literally all bound together. Travelling out of town was not common; the world was a much bigger place. Your community was yours to be proud of, and folk were proud of it. People would stick to their own communities, displaying a sense of loyalty to the characteristics it possessed and its subsequent influence on their lives. Of course, it wasn’t glamorous, but this old mill town represented our world. Its massive cinder area located adjacent to Peel Park at the end of Water Street – or Rec as it was more commonly known – was where the Stanley players would train. Out of hours, in early evening, at weekends and in school holidays, it would be transformed into an imaginary Old Trafford, for football in the winter, cricket in the summer. Kids would come from all over town to congregate for a game. It’s where we learned our skills, honing them for hours as our parents went about their own daily chores. This waste ground was a sporting mecca of hopes and dreams. From dawn to dusk – or so it seemed – you could spot Accrington’s youth transforming themselves into young Denis Comptons or taking off Duncan Edwards. Sure, if you were any good you learned the technical aspects of given sports elsewhere, but here was the stage to parade what you could do among your peers.

  That scene on Accrington Rec would have been replicated the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. Playing outdoors with a ball with your mates was a rite of passage for any child of the 1950s and several subsequent generations too. Nowadays, the parks of our towns and cities look bleak and are sparsely populated. No jumpers for goalposts, no more Ron Manager; some FIFA-branded video game being played in the front room on an abnormally large TV screen, yes, but no magic taking place in the fresh air.

  Equally empty are the inner-city streets we used to populate for a knockabout. When was the last time you saw a set of cricket stumps chalked on a wall? They were ten-a-penny in 1947, the year in which I was born. But times have changed. We are all more aware of the perils of allowing our children to unearth their own mischief, fearful that mischief or something worse will find them. The kids of this country are poorer for it. Of that I am sure.

  The Rec was also the site of three air raid shelters, reminders of the Second World War. These shelters – no longer standing as the whole area has been bulldozed and tarmacked since – represented our dens, a refuge where we could hang out when we took a break from our sporting endeavours. We would dive into them, have a chinwag over our glasses of lemonade or cream soda – never beer, as under-age drinking didn’t seem to appeal in those days – or tuck into our little penny loaves and crisps. A penny loaf was as you imagine from the description – bread baked in a tin about three inches long and an inch wide that would cost you a penny.

  Dad had been a worthy and enthusiastic sportsman himself, turning out as a right-back for several amateur football clubs over a quarter of a century. He was proud of my progress as I came up through the ranks of the local teams, meticulously scouring the newspapers in search of mentions of my achievements. Several landmarks of my boyhood participation made it into his beloved scrapbook.

  Despite our austere existence, I never wanted for kit. Poor we might have been, but Mum and Dad were typical of northern parents, I guess. I never knew how, but they always managed to find a way of purchasing the right clobber when it was required, whether that was flannels, bats, pads, cricket shoes or football boots.

  Mum also took it upon herself to kit me out in what I can only say was distinctly the wrong gear from an early age. Now let’s be clear – I don’t have anything against cross dressing per se. I just don’t feel it has ever been a pursuit for me. Mum obviously had different ideas, though. Disappointed not to get the daughter she had always craved (my parents had me relatively late in life by mid-twentieth century standards), Mum refused to let the facts get in the way of her fairytale story. So for the first five years of my life, I was her little girl.

  If things had turned out exactly as she had planned, I would have been called Gwyneth. As it was she had to make do with putting waves through the long curly hair she let drop towards my shoulders, dressing me in a frock and adding accessories. Forget toy cars. The only thing I possessed with wheels on as a toddler was a pram.

  Being an only child, I had to suffer in silence. Later in life I asked my mum why I had no brothers and sisters. ‘We only did it once,’ was her cheeky reply. My guess is that joking about it masked the truth. They’d had trouble conceiving. After all, when I was born they were both thirty-seven.

  Putting my mother’s disappointment about my gender aside, she did develop one other strange fixation when it came to me: she was convinced I had a hole in my head that used to let the cold in and was the chief cause of my asthma. She seemed to think that I would catch a chill, as the young heroes of Charles Dickens’s novels always used to, so took to sending me to school with a flying hat on. It was for my own good, she used to tell me, and to make matters slightly worse she put me in a pair of clogs with metal soles, and baggy trousers with braces to boot. Let me tell you, it’s no fun being dispatched to school looking like Roy Chubby Brown after he’s been on a hot wash. When we went swimming, the teachers were told that making me wear a swimming cap was compulsory, so concerned was Mum about water getting in around my brain.

  When it came to my health, she was always of the belief that there was something wrong with me, although for my part, other than the complex developed from dressing like a Bavarian circus extra with my lederhosen and European footwear, I generally felt fine outside the house. It was only inside that I would start coughing and wheezing. But I put that down to the multitude of birds my father brought home. The tally of canaries and budgerigars he kept throughout my childhood must have hit fifty, and I reckon it must have been a bit of budgie-fancier’s lung that I developed.

  My dad used to breed these feathered fiends and one of his early favourites was a budgie called Joey. It used to sit on his head, which meant it was covered in bird shit most of the time. In terms of his pate, imagine an albino version of Mikhail Gorbachev and you will have a pretty accurate image. Unlike me, these birds could get away with a bit of lip and Joey was the only being alive who would ever dare tell my mum what to do. ‘Put kettle on, Mary!’ it would chirp.

  My parents met through my dad playing football with my mum’s brothers. They did not see eye to eye on everything, mind you. For a start, Dad was deeply religious and my mother wasn’t. He could be found at Cambridge Street Methodist Church three times every Sunday and throughout his whole life it was his second home. In later years, he finished up as its caretaker and became a lay preacher. It was not only his refuge but the hub of the community.

  Accrington was littered with regular hangouts for me – the cricket club just on the outskirts, Peel Park where my beloved Stanley played, the Rec and the technical school where I was a pupil – yet the focal point was the church. As well as the multiple trips on a Sunday along with Dad, I would return most nights to attend the Institute’s youth club and engage in sporting pursuits. I would be one of twenty or thirty lads playing snooker, table tennis and darts, or be stood around chatting with a bottle of Sarsaparilla or lemonade in hand. We ran four snooker teams in the church league and I was a member of the D team.

 
; It was a brilliant existence, a great grounding in life. We had our own football team, a flippin’ good outfit too. We were all mates together and there was no question of any of us going to the pub. In addition to the sports teams, there was a fantastic pop group – one of those skiffle bands with a washboard and a tea chest. They were truly terrific, and as well as playing at the church they would be booked to play other gigs around the local area. The Institute was a vibrant place every night. Handed six pence on the way out the front door by my mother, this pretty sum had to get me through an evening’s entertainment. You would have to pay a contribution for the lights for the snooker, once your name was the topmost one left on the chalkboard. Table tennis, which came at no cost, was played in another room, so the rest of the money tended to go on fizzy pop.

  The bloke that ran it all was called Norman Gresham. He played in the B team when it came to snooker, with a style of play a bit like Chris Gayle’s batting. What he lacked in subtlety, he made up for in power. He just used to hammer the ball. Line it up with the cue and give it an almighty crack. He was a lovely old fella, who would give up his time every single night, Monday to Friday, taking the money for the various activities and handing out the change meticulously. But he was also part of what was a pretty special microcosm of Accrington life.

  There was a real camaraderie down there and I would make that pilgrimage happily every night as a teenager, ensuring I was back home for between nine and ten o’clock. It was a real happy hangout for me, and held me in good stead for the dressing-room environments I would experience later in life as a professional cricketer with Lancashire and England.