by Dave Spikey
NB. She actually did get my dad on the way home from the pub on a Friday night a few times and sucked all the marrow out of his bones because he could hardly stand up when he got home. He was like a rubber man.
7. Don’t rub your dad up the wrong way.
Right then. And what would be the right way, Mum?
And then my dad would take over, especially when punishment was to be meted out re: point 5 above (the snake/rake poem) – not my fault, by the way, as I had my socks down, if you remember.
Dad: Oh, you think that smut’s funny, do you?
Me: A bit. And even though she hit it with a rake, it’s still five foot four! That’s big, isn’t it, Dad?
Dad: Stop that smirking or I’ll make you smile on the other side of your face.
Me: (Thinks: Oh no! He’s taken a surgery course now!)
Dad: Do you want a smack?
Me: (Thinks: Trick question, surely?) Er … no, I think I’ll leave it, thanks, Dad.
Dad: What?! Do I look stupid?
(It was worth it just the once, wasn’t it?)
Me: Yes, Dad.
Dad: Right. That’s it! Go and fetch me something to hit you with.
(I go. I come back.)
Dad: This is a cushion.
Me: Yeah, I know.
One last thing. Where exactly was ‘kingdom come’? My dad quite often threatened to knock me there. I imagine it’s somewhere near ‘the middle of next week’, which was another possible destination.
My dad’s favourite saying was, ‘Best thing since sliced bread.’ No matter what he was enjoying at that time – whether it was a meal, a book, a drink – the simple fact was that this thing, right now, was the best thing since the invention of sliced bread by Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, USA. If you remember, a prototype Rohwedder built in 1912 was destroyed in a fire, so it was not until 1928 that Rohwedder had a fully working machine ready. Anyway, nothing in the interim period had come close to the thing my dad was enjoying at that minute: Vesta beef curry, pot noodle, JML miracle mat, etc. …
I tried to imagine various scenes.
1. Alexander Fleming presents his discovery of penicillin to the Royal Society in late 1928.
Fleming: ’Tis an antibiotic and will kill the majority of known bacteria. It will eradicate life-threatening infections and suffering throughout the world.
President of Royal Society: Sorry, Alex, look at this! It’s a ‘Toastie’ loaf!
2. Madame Marie Curie’s up next.
Marie Curie: I have discovered radium, an element that will revolutionize medicine. With X-rays, we can look inside the human body. In time, we will treat serious illness with radiography.
President of Royal Society: Sorry, love, very impressive – but have you seen this loaf? Thick and Thin! Thick and thin slices in the same loaf! Can you believe it?
I have to say that of all the wise sayings and adages I was bombarded with during my childhood, I never found any of them that (a) made much sense or (b) helped me in any way. To this day, forty years later, I have still never met anybody who …
• Poked their eye out with a stick.
• Grew an apple tree inside them because they’d eaten the core and pips.
• Broke their neck because they didn’t tie their shoelaces properly. (Their neck! That’s a heavy fall from a standing position for a sixyear-old.)
• Could hear themselves think.
• Had to tell a donkey twice.
• Ate so many chocolate biscuits they turned into a chocolate biscuit! (‘Is your David playing out? No, he’s in the biscuit tin. He ate half a packet of chocolate digestives. What can you do? I’ve warned him often enough.’)
Street Life
AFTER SCHOOL, every weekend and on school holidays, we would play out in the neighbouring streets around the mills. We’d play hide-and-seek, tig, kick-outta-ball and ‘What time is it, Mr Wolf?’.
Did you ever play that? Did you ever understand the rules? As I recall, you’d creep up a step at a time and ask Mr Wolf ( who stood with his back turned to you), ‘What time is it, Mr Wolf ?’ Mr Wolf would turn slowly, snarling, ‘Iiiiiiiit’s … 3 o’clock!’ And we would jump – ‘Arghhhh!’ – then look at each other, silently asking the question, ‘Have you any idea what the f**k is going on?’ Honestly, I have no idea what was supposed to happen until Mr Wolf shouted, ‘Dinnertime!’ and we all ran off, screaming, with Mr Wolf after us. Well, you would.
If we could get a football from someone, we’d play for hours, sometimes in the dark, in the street across the end terraces next to the mill. Chris Guffog usually had a ball, but he didn’t play out much. We used to go and call for him, and when Mrs Guffog answered the door, we’d ask, ‘Is Chris coming out to play?’ Quite often she’d say, ‘No, not tonight,’ so we’d smile and ask, ‘Is his ball coming out?’
Occasionally, one of us would get a ball for a birthday or Christmas, but you could bet that you’d only have played ten minutes with it before it went over Mad Mr Woodcock’s back yard and there was no way he would give it back. Every street had a Mad Mr Woodcock and also a witch, or in our case two witches who lived together, dressed in black and had a black cat. Definitely witches.
We’d play cricket in summer. Stephen James had a bat and someone usually had a tennis ball. I drove past recently and our chalked cricket stumps are still visible on the mill wall. We played the alternative rules version, which meant that you could be given out if caught one-handed off the wall, and any disputed wicket was decided by a peg-leg. This involved turning the bat over, holding the blade and trying to play the next ball with the handle. Hit it or not, you had to run and there was a very fair chance you would be run out. I think it’s time that these two simple variations were introduced into Test Cricket; it would make it a lot more fun, especially if there was a big wall on the offside and you could run the batsman out by hitting him with the ball: brilliant.
During Wimbledon, we’d share a tennis racquet. Because we had no tennis courts handy (and only one racquet anyway), we’d hit the ball against Mark Duncan’s gable end (his house, I mean) for hours on end. The weird thing was that no matter how well and hard you hit the ball over the line drawn on the gable end, the wall always won.
Boys would play marbles (marps); the girls would do traditional skipping with a rope or the Chinese variation with elastic bands, which involved no actual skipping or reference to China whatsoever. They also played hopscotch, which I never understood, and some game that involved tucking their skirts into their knickers and bouncing a ball off the wall between their legs.
If we needed a bit more excitement, we’d play knock-a-door-run and its variant, which involved scraping dog poo into a paper bag, setting fire to it on someone’s doorstop, then knocking on the door. If you were lucky (and they were unlucky), they’d see the paper bag in flames and immediately stamp on it hard – dog biz city!
Then our mums would call us in for tea. (Point of order here. Your evening meal is ‘tea’ – fact. Your midday meal is ‘dinner’. That’s why, at school, your midday meal is served by ‘dinner ladies’, not ‘lunch ladies’.) So, okay, we’d go in to get ready for tea. Dad would soon be home from work and we’d all sit down at the table to eat. ‘All’ being my mum and dad, sister Joy, who is three years younger than me, and later my brother Peter, five years behind Joy. We’d have corned beef hash or hot-pot or my favourite: a meat-and-potato pie covered with Heinz vegetable soup – oh yes, you read that right. Beautiful.
Friday tea was courtesy of the chippy. My job. Off I’d go, clattering up the back street in my red plastic moulded sandals, carrying a bowl for the steak puddings, which they’d take off you and keep warm until it was your turn. Fish and chips was always cod, unless you asked loudly for an alternative as soon as you got in the queue. Dad sometimes fancied a plaice and I hated having to order it, I felt so self-conscious shouting to make myself heard: ‘Can you put me a plaice in, please?’
David
Dickinson continually says ‘cheap as chips’. Chips round our way now are £1.80 a bag. That’s not cheap! But it is a useful economic indicator of our times. If I wanted £1.80’s worth of chips when I was a kid, I’d have to have taken a wheelbarrow, and once I’d got them, the chippy would have to have shut. Not enough potatoes in Bolton for that many chips.
During tea, we’d talk about our day and listen to the radio. Later, we’d read books and comics, do puzzles, play snakes and ladders or draughts, and listen to the radio some more, especially if there was a comedy programme on. Sometimes, my dad would put one of his Deutsche Gramophone LPs on the radiogram and sit in his chair conducting the Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Wagner’s Tannhäuser (bit heavy for an eight-year-old) with one of my mum’s knitting needles. We’d all look up from our comics or puzzles and watch him conducting the overture with his long hair flying, or we’d simply listen to the music and stare into the coal fire, making shapes from the flames. Happy days.
Snow and Sun
IN THE WINTER school holidays, we’d wake up to thick frost on the windows and take turns at going downstairs to get the coal fire going. Clean out yesterday’s mountain of ash and, in the days before firelighters, roll up pages of last night’s newspaper into tubes and then tie a knot in them. We’d pack the grate with these before adding kindling and coal.
Getting the fire going was a risky business. The technique involved standing the shovel up against the fire and covering it with a sheet of newspaper to get the flames drawing up through the kindling and coal. One lapse of concentration and the sheet of newspaper would first turn brown, then burst into flames! ‘Mum? I need some butter!’
After breakfast, porridge usually, we’d be well wrapped up and out into the snow. We’d make snowmen and long icy slides and have snowball fights. Sometimes, we’d go sledging in Queen’s Park if Chris Guffog’s toboggan was coming out to play.
I’ve always thought that we should put in for the Winter Olympics in the North-West. We’ve started getting the weather for it, plus, if we hosted the Games, we could introduce events that the Swiss, Austrians and Scandinavians wouldn’t stand a chance at. We could have ‘Sliding Down a Hill on a Bin Bag’; we’d be halfway down ‘Winter Hill’ and the Swiss and Austrians would be still examining the bag at the top (‘Was ist das?’). We could have ‘Old Men Clearing a Path Relay’ – because we lead the world in that. Our old men are limping down to the shed as soon as the first snowflake falls, nailing a flat piece of plywood to a long bit of 2 × 1, then they’re off. We could have proper, big Olympic snowball fighting. Imagine the scene: we’ve drawn Germany in the quarter-finals; get a bit of coal in.
In the summer school holidays, we’d spend all day playing in the neighbourhood or we’d take a picnic to Queen’s Park. We made sugar butties (mmm: nutritious. If I get asked to do Ready Steady Cook again, I’m going to take sugar, butter and bread as my ingredients) and we wrapped them in shiny bread wrapper. We made our own pop by getting a small packet of kali (rainbow crystals or American cream soda) from the corner shop and dissolving it in a bottle of tap water. I once tried to make a cheese toastie using my mum’s iron, but that went horribly wrong and I got smacked legs.
We used to get a few sweets from the penny tray: ‘fruit salad’, ‘blackjacks’ (probably banned now) and cinder toffee. We didn’t have Kinder Surprise – which, by the way, isn’t ever a surprise. It’s always a plastic toy that you have to assemble, always. That’s not a surprise, that’s cheating kids, that is. If it was a mouse’s head, fair enough. That’s a surprise, a proper surprise: Kinder have delivered. Or, somebody’s appendix … ‘Jeez! What’s that?!’ If it says ‘surprise’, it should be a surprise.
If I’d managed to save up enough pocket money, I’d get a cider ice lolly (and of course pretend to get drunk off it!) or my absolute favourite – a frozen Jubbly. They were great: a big pyramid-shaped lump of frozen orange. Trouble with a frozen Jubbly was that sometimes you’d be so excited about getting one, you’d rip a strip of the packaging off and squeeze too hard and the Jubbly would shoot out into the air and land on the pavement about two feet away. Be alright, dust all the dirt off, oh – bit of dog poo, flick it off and try to get it back in the packet … almost impossible, you could never get it back in properly. But it would last you all day would a frozen Jubbly, and when all the juice had been extracted and you no longer had any feeling in your mouth, you were still left with a small meteorite: the perfect projectile for skirmishes in the park.
I loved Jubblys and ice-pops. One day, during school term, the dinner ladies went on strike (at dinnertime), and our parents gave us two shillings to get our dinner from the chip shop. All my mates got pudding, chips and peas, or pie, chips and peas, or fish and chips, and then it was my turn: ‘Scraps and gravy, please, with a bit of pea-wet [the juice off mushy peas].’ ‘One penny please.’ ‘There you go.’
Then off to the corner shop: ‘Twenty-three ice-pops, if you please.’ I stuffed them into my inside blazer pocket … and by the time I got back to school, I was flatlining. The school nurse panicked – ‘He’s got no pulse!’ Luckily, they discovered the ice-pops packed over my heart. Mr Freeze nearly killed me.
We spent all day playing, making our own fun. Spin round and round and round and round, get dizzy, fall over – piss funny. Picking buttercups, holding them under each others’ chins and saying, ‘You like butter.’
‘I know!’
‘Ha! Brilliant.’
Using ‘sugar-stealers’ (dandelion seeds) to tell the time. ‘What time do you have to be in?’
‘Five o’clock. What time is it now?’
None of us had a watch, so pick up a sugar-stealer and blow the seeds away, puff, puff, puff … ‘Three o’clock.’
‘Plenty of time.’
We’d lie on our backs, making shapes out of the clouds for hours … ‘Polar bear’; ‘Galleon’; ‘Seagull. No, wait, that is actually a proper seagull.’ We’d catch caterpillars, put them in a jam jar and watch them die. Simple, innocent pleasures. Well …
Dewek Wigby also taught us lads a game where you go for a wee, but hold your foreskin tight shut, until it fills up and swells like a frog in mating season and hurts bad … real bad … excruciating bad. The first time, I screamed, ‘What do I do with it now, Dewek?!’
He replied, ‘Just let go.’
I did.
Pop – whoooshhhhh! Talk about a golden shower! Great game.
Playground Laughs
IN BETWEEN OUR playground games of tig, hide-and-seek, ‘What time is it, Mr Wolf?’, football, cricket and hoperooski – a game eventually banned by the teachers because it was considered too violent1 – we started telling jokes.
Generally, they were about nuns, elephants in a mini, shark-infested custard, frogs in a blender, and ‘Mummy Mummy’ jokes, e.g.
‘Mummy Mummy, can I lick the bowl?’ – ‘No, flush it like everyone else.’
‘Mummy Mummy, I don’t like Grandma’ – ‘Well, just eat your vegetables then.’
‘Mummy Mummy, I don’t want to go to Australia’ – ‘Shut up and keep digging.’
Then there were visual jokes. My favourites included pulling the skin on either side of your neck out between your thumbs and forefingers and saying, ‘Please, miss, can I have another pencil?’ and hooking your forefinger into your bottom lip and pulling down hard and mumbling,
‘Could you hang your umbrella somewhere else, please?’ or squashing your face tight between both hands and saying, ‘Could you open the lift doors again, please?’ You had to be there, probably.
Some of the most popular jokes weren’t technically jokes at all, they were riddles, e.g.
What’s green and hangs off trees?
Leaves?
No. Monkey snot.
What do you call a kangaroo with no skin?
Slippy.
There was one of these riddles/jokes which I ‘got’, but which I didn’t find funny, because it just didn’t ring true. T
his riddle was – and I’m sure you’re familiar with it – ‘What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?’ Of course, the answer is: ‘Finding half a worm.’ I never really found that funny because even at that tender age, I could think of loads of things that had happened to me that were infinitely worse than finding half a worm in my apple.
Simple things like, being sick down your nose. Your mouth’s full and the sick has to come out somehow; it can’t come out of your ears, can it? So whoooosh, arghh, burn, burn nose! Even worse when you’ve had a corned beef hash for tea and there’s a chunk of carrot stuck in the top of one nostril. ‘I wish I’d chewed that a little bit better.’
I’ll tell you something else that is worse than half a worm: getting your willy caught in your zip is worse. I’d already done that by the age of ten, with half a dozen near misses besides. Most times, you could extract it easily, but occasionally the zip head would trap some skin – a little ‘U’-shaped flap stuck tight. And the shock is exceeded only by the pain. It’s an exquisite, intense pain and it demands immediate attention. But you have a dilemma – do you zip up or zip down? The pain is piercing now and then your mate runs up in a panic and thrusts a half-eaten apple at you, shouting, ‘Urgh, look, half a worm!’ and you scream back full in his face: ‘Stick your worm! Look at my bleeding dick, you bleeding dick!’
Around the same time, something else happened to me that was worse than finding half a worm in an apple. It happened during our weekly swimming lesson, when we were marched in double file down to the municipal baths.