by Dave Spikey
I hated going swimming from school. I hated it because our maths teacher took us and he was a psycho, a proper psycho who didn’t have a cane for corporal punishment; he used a broken chair leg. I’m not joking, a broken chair leg! I reckon he must have thrown a chair at a kid at some time and it smashed to bits and he saw the fragments and said in his Neanderthal way, ‘Chair leg – good.’ Seriously, he hit misbehaving kids with a chair leg. Imagine that these days! He was as mad as a bucket of frogs. I can’t tell you his name for obvious reasons, but he was married to a woman called Mrs Matthews.
I hated him, and because of that I hated maths – and so became hopeless at maths. Right from those early problems: ‘If it takes two men with one bucket ten minutes to fill a bath, how long would it take one man with …’ Stop it right there! Why don’t they just turn the taps on? And why’ve they only got one bucket? Are they simple?
Alternatively, do you remember this one? ‘A swimming pool is twenty-five yards by ten yards and you have two planks, one of which is five yards long and one of which is three yards long. How do you get to the other side of the pool?’ ‘I walk round.’
I could never remember formulae in maths. I couldn’t even remember the acronyms we had to learn to help us. Do you remember BODMAS? It was a way of aiding us to remember in which order an algebraic equation should be solved: Brackets first, then ‘Of ’, then Division, then Multiplication, then Addition and finally Subtraction. But how do you ever remember the acronym BODMAS in an exam? I remember sitting in the exam room, staring blankly at my algebra equation, thinking, ‘BAMSOD? BASMOD? BOMSAD? That sounds about right.’
The only one I remember was SOHCAHTOA. I don’t know why, it’s far more complicated than BODMAS, but it nearly rhymes with Pocahontas, the Native American princess who married John Smith. (I don’t think that was his real name, do you?) Anyway, the first two syllables sort of match – ‘SOCAH’ and ‘POCA’ – so … If you recall, it is a formula for working out the other angles of a right-angled triangle. The acronym stands for Sine = Opposite over Hypotenuse, Cosine = Adjacent over Hypotenuse, and Tangent = Opposite over Adjacent, and I’ll tell you something for nothing: that’s come in bloody handy in my adult life. The number of times I have to deal with triangles each and every day. Colleagues constantly asking, ‘What angle’s that, Dave?’ ‘It’s a Toblerone, just eat the pissing thing.’
There were all sorts of stupid rhymes and phrases they taught us in school, like ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’ to remember the colours of the rainbow, and the other one that did my head in: the rhyme to aid you in remembering the number of days in a month. You know the one, it goes like this:
Thirty days hath September (got it)
April, June and November (good)
All the rest have thirty-one (okay, that’s simple enough)
Apart from February (what?!)
Which has twenty-eight (twenty-eight? Well, okay, then)
Unless it’s a leap year when there’s twenty-nine (no! What sort of shit rhyme is that?)
How the hell does that rhyme make it easier to remember? More to the point, which idiot came up with that distribution? How come February did so badly out of it? Why not have: ‘Thirty-five days hath December (longer for Christmas holidays), all the rest have thirty.’ That’s it, done. Fairer all round.
Anyway … back to the swimming lesson and the thing that was worse than half a worm. The week before this traumatic incident, the teacher had told us that they’d put some special substance in the water so that if you peed in it, it would change colour and they’d know immediately who was peeing and you were out.
Well, me and my mates thought that was brilliant! We were going to do the ‘Red Arrows’. We drank loads of water before the lesson, then headed for the deep end. Me, as squadron leader, gave the command:
‘Right now. Peel away … and piss!’ We swam and pissed; I looked behind me – nothing! It’s just yellow! Yellow’s no good, I can do yellow anytime!
Then it happened – this worse than half a worm thing, even worse than swimming through all your mates’ piss. I was swimming breaststroke, breathing out underwater as you do, then surface for a deep breath, and this one time, as I breathed in a lungful of air, I also sucked in a plaster. There was always a plaster in the swimming pool, wasn’t there? Bobbing away in that guttering thing at the side of the pool, usually. A dirty plaster with one corner folded over, usually. So, I swallowed this plaster, straight down. And it was lumpy! I thought, ‘Verruca.’ Urrggh, half a worm?! I’d have eaten a plateful of worms rather than swallowing that plaster!
5 November 1960
A MOMENTOUS DAY in my childhood. Bonfire Night, obviously, but also the day that my dad first took me to see Bolton Wanderers FC at Burnden Park. He’d bought me a big wooden rattle and I’d spent the last couple of days covering it with black-and-white-checked sticky tape. (Bolton played in white shirts and navy blue shorts and it was the nearest match.)
Bolton were playing Manchester City and although I was a massive Bolton fan even at that age, I was looking forward to seeing the great Denis Law. I thought that I was going to burst with excitement; and I thought my mum was simply going to burst as she was due to have a baby on 10 November and was enormous.
We walked to the match. I lived at 3 Grafton Street, just round the corner from a pub called Sally Up Steps, which was at the bottom of Chorley Old Road, so we cut through Bolton Royal Infirmary onto Chorley Street, passing two ornate elephant statues on some old gate posts (the elephant features prominently on Bolton’s coat-of-arms and there are many sculptures dotted around the town still). Then we crossed the ‘High Level’, passing the fire station and into town. We went through the town centre to Trinity Street station, then down passed ‘Edbros’, crossing the railway lines on Orlando Bridge and down onto Manchester road – where we turned right and joined the huge tide of supporters heading down the road. I could see the floodlights of Burnden Park now.
I know this will mean nothing to most of you readers, but as I write it, I am reliving that happy journey in my mind, so please excuse the indulgence.
The crowds were huge in those days; I think that there were about 40,000 on Burnden Park on that day. Although my dad usually stood on the Bolton Embankment end, he took me into the Paddock to avoid the crush, which he had rightly judged would be too dangerous and scary for a nine-year-old.
When I got into my teens, I always went on the embankment, where the atmosphere was electric: the chanting, the humour, the wild celebrations and the heartbreak were mixed with the always present fear of being trapped within such a huge crowd. At the end of the game, thousands of the fans on our end had to file out through three narrow exits. Quite often, me and my mates would optimistically say, ‘We’ll wait here until the crush is over.’
No chance: the plain fact was that you had no say in the matter; if the mass around you started to move, you’d move with it, staring at the exit and thinking, ‘We’ll never get through there!’ your feet sometimes hardly touching the ground. But we always did, quite often bluffing through our fear with shouts of ‘Mind my eggs!’ in a desperate hope that people would give you more space, but really – eggs at a football match?
Anyway, on 5 November 1960, I cheered till I was hoarse and rattled my new rattle as Bolton Wanderers took to the pitch, led by the legendary Nat Lofthouse – ‘The Lion of Vienna’ – who famously said, ‘In my day, there were plenty of players who would kick your bollocks off – the difference was that at the end of the match they would shake your hand and help you look for them.’ Also playing that day was our new golden boy Francis Lee, a local lad from Westhoughton, who was sixteen! Sixteen and playing in the first division (the Premier League of its day)!
The game was end-to-end stuff (that’s how it works, usually; sometimes it’s more one end than the other, admittedly, but … ) and totally mesmerizing and exciting for a nine-year-old. Bolton won 3-1 and both Nat Lofthouse and Frannie Lee scored. People say tha
t I am mistaken when I say that I saw Nat and Frannie play in the same side; that they were of different eras and that my childhood memories have been clouded by time, but I can assure you that I remember it as if it was yesterday. Frannie Lee scored a diving header! (Not the obligatory penalty he scored almost weekly when he moved to Man City later in his career.)
After the game, we walked back down Manchester Road into town and bought a ‘Buff ’, the football results newspaper, which was printed hastily after the game and sold from a van. On the way home, we would read the match report on the match we had just watched! How mad was that? Because of the speed at which it was produced, it often contained typo errors. I remember years later a front-page picture of Johnny Byrom, our brilliant centre forward, firing a shot at the opposing goalkeeper, who had only managed to parry the ball, such was its ferocity. It was a great picture, capturing the moment perfectly on that very cold January day, with the players’ breath hanging like steam in the air. The big caption should have read, ‘Byrom’s Shot Warms Goalkeeper’s Hands’, but one little error can make so much difference and cause so much hilarity, especially when it results in, ‘Byrom’s Shit Warms Goalkeeper’s Hands’.
So home we went, it was five o’clock and going dark and the anticipation of Bonfire Night gradually replaced the excitement of the match. Bonfire Night or ‘Bommy Night’ round our way used to be a massive thing, a community event which took weeks and weeks to prepare.
Each group of terraced streets had its own bonfire celebrations. In Grafton Street, we shared ours with Laburnum Street, with which we shared a back street. Our gang would start collecting wood and other combustible material for our bommys during the back end of the summer holidays and all through September and October after school and at weekends. We would take our axes (really!) and cut down dead and dying branches from trees and bushes in Queen’s Park and along Chorley New Road, and drag them home through the streets. We’d raid the cotton mills for big wicker skips, which burned like mad. Some of them we’d find broken and discarded in the mill yard, but if there weren’t so many, or another gang had beaten us to it, we’d actually get into the mill at night via rickety metal fire escapes and take proper good ones.
We would make our dens out of these skips on shed roofs and take it in turns to sit in them and guard our bonfires – bonfires in the plural because we had our big main bommy halfway down the back street with two ‘feeder’ bommys at either end. And your bommys would get raided by other gangs, so we had to repel the enemy with hand-to-hand combat or by using ingeniously constructed firework weapons.
There used to be three different types of banger, ranging from the penny ‘cannon’ through to the biggest, fattest and noisiest with the most potential for injury, the ‘3-2-1-zero’, which we used to repel attack by lobbing or firing at the enemy. If you had a good arm, you could hit them with a full toss or, failing that, you could fire them from a ‘gun’ constructed out of a small metal tube we found in the mills fitted with a wooden handle carved from a block of wood with your penknife; the fizz from the banger fuse was strong enough to propel them from the tube over quite a distance.
The same laws of backstreet physics produced the drainpipe bazooka/ rocket launcher, which obviously caused mayhem after a one-shilling ‘Starburst’ rocket was lit and dropped into the adapted length of drainpipe.
Of course, the days of bonfire guerrilla warfare have long since gone; health-and-safety quangos have gradually killed off another great British tradition. However, I can say, hand on heart, that I can’t remember anyone being seriously injured in the skirmishes over the years. Mind you, that might be because my memory has never been the same since I got hit in the temple by a mini rocket when I was eight. There was a lad from our street who did lose an eye on Bonfire Night, but that happened when he tried to fire a ‘Roman Candle’ at a rival gang from the passenger seat of a moving car without having had the good sense to wind the window down first.
But on 5 November 1960, health-and-safety directives, risk assessments and standard operating procedures were just clouds on the distant horizon. I dashed in, still on a high from the match, and blurted out every memory I had of the day to my mum as I ate my cup of black peas – the first course on the traditional Bonfire Night ‘menu’. Hot-pot and red cabbage would follow outside round the bonfire, with jacket potatoes and chestnuts cooked in the embers, then parkin and treacle toffee.
After the peas, I dashed to my bedroom to retrieve my metal biscuit tin, which contained the assortment of fireworks I’d accumulated over the previous weeks. I’d open the lid and do a quick inventory, then try to work out a lighting schedule. First the ‘Snow Storm’, then the ‘Traffic Light’, then ‘Mount Vesuvius’, then the ‘Katherine Wheel’, ‘Roman Candle’, ‘Golden Fountain’ etc.
Then I’d put my duffel coat on, grab my balaclava (which you needed to wear for dashing past the blazing bonfire) and run outside to where our dads were taking the back gates off their hinges to prevent the paint blistering from the heat. Now it was time to try to light the bonfire, which had been predictably (and traditionally) drenched by four days of November rain. Dads diced with death pouring petrol on it as a last resort, but then it was lit and the flames took hold and a cheer went up from the entire population of those two terraced streets as the flames began to lick the trousers of the Guy Fawkes dummy atop the pyre.
Then the fireworks started and the dads took charge of lighting them whilst at the same time announcing the next pyrotechnic as they lit the fuse at arm’s length. Roman Candles shot their coloured balls to ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, sky rockets burst above the roofs and families cheered, bangers exploded accompanied by shouts and screams, and Katherine Wheels spun a dazzling pattern … then got stuck … then got prodded by a dad with a stick and resumed the spin … then stuck again. The biggest screams and shouts of the night were caused by the ‘jumping jacks’ – small concertina-shaped firecrackers that exploded a segment at a time, each explosion causing the firework to jump in an unpredictable pattern, but always, always following you as if they contained some sort of homing device!
On this night, 5 November 1960, a jumping jack went down my heavily pregnant mother’s wellie (obligatory wear for Bonfire Night). Such was the shock that she straight away went into labour with my brother Peter, who was due on the 10th. People always say that it must have been terribly traumatic for her, but I say, ‘Yes, but look on the bright side – if her waters hadn’t broken when they did … she’d have suffered third-degree burns to her foot.’
Bonfire Night was a real family and community event. We’ve lost it forever and that’s a great sadness. I spend a lot of time in Spain now, where the values of community and family are cherished and celebrated at every opportunity. Throughout the year, there are fiestas small and grand celebrating saints’ days, historical and national events. The stunning ‘Moors and Christians’ festival celebrated over three nights is amazing; the Fallas – where massive, beautifully crafted effigies are paraded through the streets before being burned as the fire brigade hose down the surrounding buildings to protect them from the heat – is unbelievable. Communities line the streets of villages, towns and cities to watch these stunning processions, thrilled by the awesome costumes and stirred by the magnificent music of the marching bands.
Once the main event has ended, the street parties begin. In small avenues and squares, friends and families assemble around tables and chairs and eat and drink, laugh and talk, sing and dance as their marching bands play again and again and again … until the early hours of the morning.
BWFC
ON THAT UNFORGETTABLE day, 5 November 1960, I became a loyal Bolton Wanderers FC fan. I was born in Bolton and that’s how it works, you don’t get a choice; I was just lucky that I was born where I was because I loved the club then and I do now. BWFC is a great club with a great history, and above all it is a great family club with a warm welcome for everybody.
Over the next few years, me and my mates neve
r missed a home game and also got to the nearer away games. There was nothing like cheering your team on to a well-earned 2-1 win on a cold, wet and grey January afternoon, before trudging off home for tea, a welcoming fire, pudding, chips and peas, bread and butter and a mug of tea. Once we got a TV, it would be Doctor Who, Emergency Ward 10 and The Black and White Minstrel Show and then later, if you were lucky, coming down in your pyjamas to watch Match of the Day. Not changed much, has it?
In the school holidays, we’d go down to watch the Wanderers train. We’d make BWFC albums out of old exercise books using photos cut from the Bolton Evening News and tried to get the players to sign their photo when they arrived for training. Most were very generous with their signings; some were more difficult: for example, Gordon ‘Chunky’ Taylor, now chairman of the PFA and a lovely man, wouldn’t sign if he saw that he’d previously signed a photo.
In stark contrast was Barry Fry. We’d signed him one close season and I’d cut out loads of pictures of him from the papers for my book. I dashed over to him one afternoon as I recognized him getting out of his car. He took my album and signed every single photo ‘Best Wishes, Barry Fry’ – every one! I wanted to get away because Wyn Davies had arrived and I desperately wanted his autograph, but Barry wouldn’t let go of my book!
Once they’d all arrived and got changed, we’d follow them over to the training ground on Bromwich Street and watch the full training session. We had some great players in those years. In addition to the players I’ve mentioned, we had two great fullbacks – Syd Farrimond (Syd – that’s a proper name, that is) and Roy ‘Chopper’ Hartle. You wouldn’t want to be a winger playing against a fullback whose nickname was ‘Chopper’, would you? Roy was built like a tank and was hard but fair. Syd was also a class act.
One of my greatest thrills now I’ve achieved a degree of success and become a ‘known’ Boltonian is that I have got to meet some of these sporting heroes of mine. Roy Hartle is a charming, well-spoken man and Syd is an absolute gent. When I see them at the Reebok and they shout, ‘Alright, Dave?’ it is still the biggest thrill.