Child from Home

by John Wright

  I enjoyed Art, which involved drawing, painting and making things from all kinds of materials; Miss Francis allowed us a certain amount of free play and gave us pictures to copy. Sheets of newspaper, thick with paint as they had been used over and over again, were spread out for us to work on and most seemed to enjoy making a colourful mess with paints and crayons. I discovered, to my surprise, that I was better at pencil drawing than most of the other children, but I do not recall my latent talent ever being encouraged or exploited. In those early war years our work often revealed our inner fears and anxieties, and most of our drawings and paintings at this time took the form of lurid war scenes portraying soldiers fighting or ships being sunk by enemy U-boats. We often drew pictures of German aeroplanes, with black crosses on them, firing at people adrift in the sea. Following reports of raids on York, our pictures showed bombed houses with ambulancemen putting dead or injured people onto stretchers. It seems that we were regurgitating things we had seen in the papers or heard on the wireless.

  Physical Training, known as PT, was of the ‘arms stretch, knees bend’ variety; Harry, Jimmy and I called it Physical Jerks. We were stood in lines in our white vests and baggy, navy-blue football shorts that were held up by a length of elastic in the waistband (if you were lucky like Harry), whose group had PT outside in the schoolyard where they shivered in the cold. Our PT lessons were carried out in St Mary’s hall with the benches and desks pushed back to the walls or on the field out the back when the weather was fine. We had to run, jump and stretch to the commands, ‘One-two, one-two’ etc. The girls wore white blouses, and baggy, navy-blue school knickers with elasticated legs, that often had a small pocket on the front in which they kept their hankie and other mysterious objects. Both sexes wore plimsolls, known as ‘plimmies’ locally, which were usually carried to and from school in a cloth bag with a drawstring, but to us Middlesbrough lads they were always known as sandshoes. The girls sometimes had dance lessons accompanied by a teacher playing the piano and the older boys played football on the sports field behind South Lane.

  I was paralysingly shy and extremely self-conscious among what seemed confident children, and if I became the object of attention for any reason, I tended to turn scarlet with embarrassment. If you wanted a pencil or needed to go to the toilet you had to raise your hand, and I had seen others doing it, but I had an irrational dread of being noticed. I tried to make myself small and kept my head down, putting my arm round my work so as to keep it hidden in the hope of going unnoticed. I hated going to the old brick toilet block in the playground, which reeked of urine and Jeyes fluid, but I would ‘pay a call’ just before going in to school and then try to last out until playtime. I was often bursting to go but would never ask to leave the classroom if I could help it. I could not get the slits in the thick, finger-like strips on the end my braces onto the buttons at the back of my trousers and, to my intense mortification and acute embarrassment, the teachers had to help me. I developed a strong aversion to trouser buttons, which exists to this day. People tried to hide their phobias in those days, unlike today, and I still dislike the look and feel of buttons. The introduction of trouser belts and zips was a godsend to me.

  We ‘vaccies’ were often looked on as non-persons and were blamed for anything that went wrong and, in the ‘big’ school, there were sometimes fights in the playground between vaccies and the locals. It is easy to forget the mental pain that we suffered as children. Life, at that time, seemed fragmented and unreal as I tried to find my way in a strange and daunting environment. The longing to be accepted by our peers and to be a member of the pack can be very powerful and we choose to forget the devious, shifty and furtive methods we used to achieve this. I tried at all costs to avoid the wrath and the withering scorn of the adults in power over me. Children in those days did not have half of the confidence and assurance of the modern variety. I was a dreamer, like Mam, and was too timid to ask for things to be repeated when I did not understand them. I had a fear of appearing silly in front of my peers and, consequently, I did not learn the basics of most subjects and therefore failed to make much progress. In those days children were expected to be, as Mrs Harris repeatedly pointed out, seen and not heard. Speech was silver, silence was said to be golden; so who was I to challenge these tried and tested, time-honoured laws?

  A lad in Jimmy’s group that I got on well with was called Bernard Fisher, and when we played football in the field on the other side of North Lane, Jimmy and I always wanted to be in the same team as him. He was a very good player and his team always won. He was one of a large family living next door but one to us and was the eldest son of Mrs Mabel Fisher (née Brooke), a chubby, motherly and loving sort of woman who usually wore her dark straight hair cut quite short. Bernard was destined to become the Hull City and – at a later date –Bradford City goalkeeper. His brother, David, was four years old at that time and he had a cute little two-year-old sister called Maud.

  All of the Fisher children were born at home – delivered by Nurse Lealman – as was the normal practice in those days. Being the district nurse-cum-midwife, she was a regular visitor at the houses over the years. Although a bit bossy at times, she was well liked in the village. Maud became a pretty, wavy-haired, rounded little girl; ‘a right little moppet,’ as the local folk said. I would often see her running about in her little cotton frock with white ankle socks and sandals as she played in their front garden. We were repeatedly told by Mrs Harris not to mix with the other children and never, ever to bring them to her house.

  Maud’s grandfather was living with his daughter and her family on Usher Lane. He had served his apprenticeship as a gardener and I remember him as a thin, serious and gaunt-faced man who always wore a black trilby hat with a muffler, tied tightly at the neck and tucked into his collarless shirt. We often saw him going about on his old bike carrying a scythe and sickle. In his later years he worked as a lengthman for the council maintaining a set area of the local roads. Maud’s grandad slept in the box room, and she had initially slept in a drawer as a baby.

  Talking of sleep, we infants still had a half-hour catnap in the early afternoon but we did not lie down as we had at the nursery school; we rested our heads on our forearms on the deeply etched lids of our old wooden desks. It was often difficult to sleep, especially when the great circular saw was whining and screeching, as it sliced through the great balks of timber at the carpentry business along the lane. On quiet days sound travelled a long way. The teachers were ordered to carry out kit inspections on the evacuees at least once a week, and if clothes needed repairing or replacing their parents were contacted. Mrs Harris was forever sending letters to Middlesbrough asking for more clothes for us, but for some reason we didn’t always get them, even though Mam and Aunt Hilda swore that they had sent them.

  A local ARP unit had been set up and they came to our school to give demonstrations; and they put up aircraft wall charts showing the silhouettes of British and German aircraft. They told us where we could and could not go and what to do if an air raid took place. They showed Jimmy’s group how to use sand, stirrup pumps and buckets of water to put out small incendiary fires, explaining how to deal safely with the strange-looking butterfly bombs which had a metal casing that split open on impact to look like wings. We carried out regular air-raid drills when – on the teacher’s command – we practised getting down quickly to sit cross-legged underneath our desks.

  We practised putting on our heavy gas masks. On duty the wardens wore wide-brimmed tin helmets with a white W painted on them and a navy-blue, one-piece, denim boiler suit with a badge on the breast. They put up a poster that stated: ‘Hitler will send no warning – so always carry your gas mask.’ The rubber mask had a large, lozenge-shaped, celluloid eyepiece, and at the front was a canister that had small circular perforations, which filtered out any gas but allowed air through. The chin was placed inside and the mask was pulled over the top of the head by placing the thumbs under the three white canvas straps attached
to the rubber by metal buckles at the back. They could be adjusted to give a close fit and the mask was removed by pulling the straps forward over the head from the back.

  The fitting instructions were printed on the underside of the lid of the box, ending in a warning printed in bold capital letters and underlined, which stated: ‘DO NOT TAKE RESPIRATOR OFF BY PULLING THE CONTAINER UPWARDS OVER THE FACE’. Initially, I experienced an awful choking sensation when the mask was on and I would start to sweat, which caused the eyepiece to steam up, at which point I began to cry and panic before quickly ripping the mask off. Later, Miss Francis was given a supply of green demisting capsules to rub on to the visor, and when these ran out we used soap to keep it clear. In time I got used to wearing it, as did thousands of other children. To test that the mask was properly fitted an ARP man placed the palm of his hand over the front of the cylinder for a few seconds, and if you struggled to breathe it was correctly fitted. The rubber sides of the mask would sometimes make a rude fluttering noise as we breathed out, like the present-day whoopee cushion, and we laughed until our sides hurt. Embossed on the lid of the box was the word TOP which enabled people to find the lid in the dark.

  In my class group there was a shy little girl called Eva Pulleyn who was usually better dressed than the rest and lived in a big house. Behind it there were a number of old brick outbuildings surrounding a long courtyard. Eva came from a large family and her father was a bricklayer and a brickmaker by trade. He used the ground floor of the granary as workshops and her elder brother, Bill, kept a vintage Lanchester car in the stables. The old car dated from before the Great War. Building materials, such as cement, bricks, timber, sand, flagstones and the like, were piled up around the yard or were stored in the outbuildings.

  On the eastern side of the yard there was a huge two-storeyed barn half full of rectangular straw bales where Eva kept a lamb. With its winches, wooden steps and trapdoors, it was a paradise to Jimmy and me when we played there. We would leap about on the straw and jump down from the loft into the area where her three squealing pigs were kept. Next to it was another brick building in which there was a wash-house and copper. On a shelf in one of the outhouses, above the iron mangle and the fluted, aluminium poss tub, there were bags of Sharp’s meal, which was mixed with the potatoes that were too small to sell and boiled-up for pig feed. Rhode Island Reds and scarlet-combed Wyandottes busily clucked, scratched and pecked at the grain scattered on the concrete of the yard, and the family kept battery hens in the old brick granary above the stables. Nearby were tins of Jeyes Fluid, which was used to sterilise the hencoops that always had a slightly sour smell. On other shelves there were packets of Colman’s starch with red and black labels; packets of Sunlight soap; red-and-white boxes of Reckitt’s Blue Dolly Bags; white cardboard boxes of Borax; Lux Soap Flakes and other washing products.

  At the far end of the yard there was an old wooden shed with open areas of grassland at each side. On the roof of the granary was a white-painted dovecote but all we ever saw going in and out of it were pigeons, and Eva had to explain that, ‘Pigeons with their pink chests and bronze backs are known as turtledoves and their fledglings are called squabs.’

  When the weather was dry we were allowed to play in the field behind the school at break times and sometimes lessons were held in it. There was no playground at St Mary’s hall and the church graveyard was out of bounds to us. If it was too wet and muddy we had permission to go in Mr Pulleyn’s courtyard on the understanding that we did not move or damage anything. We made dens in the prickly straw bales stacked in the barn, getting our arms and legs scratched and sore in the process, and we scrambled up the wooden ladder to the loft as nimbly as spiders. Wide-eyed with wonder we gathered round to watch the men as they worked on the black, open-topped vintage car that had large, shiny brass lights, thin white-walled tyres and wire-spoked wheels. They cranked the old engine with the starting handle until it puttered into life, but the long metal handle had been known to suddenly whip back. It could break a thumb or crack the wrist if it was not held properly and released at the moment the engine fired. We giggled excitedly when we were allowed to sit on the shiny leather back seat that was forward of the back axle so that the passengers were not bounced about too much. The highly polished, wooden dashboard gleamed in the weak winter sunshine as I sat on the box set into the wide running board and the car was driven around the yard. We took turns at squeezing the rubber bulb that made a deep honking ‘parp’ come from the shiny brass horn.

  The Pulleyns were a respected and long-established family in the village and Eva was the youngest. Their family tree had many branches and its roots had been firmly set in the local soil for generations and members of her family had built many of the houses in the village. Some, like her sixty-year-old uncle, Robert James Pulleyn, were to play an important part in the civic affairs of the area, becoming Lord Mayor of York from 1939 to 1940. The founder of a successful firm of building contractors, he owned the Grand Picture House on Gillygate and was still an eminent member and alderman of York City Council.

  Mr Wray, whose flat cart was known locally as a rulley, delivered our coal, which was neatly stacked in hundredweight hessian sacks next to a pair of heavy metal scales. Humping the sacks on his leather-clad shoulders, he emptied them into the coalbunker. The bottom of the coalhouse door must have scraped across the path for a long time, as it had left an arc-shaped mark on the flagstones.

  Leaflets and items appeared in the newspapers under the title ‘Food Facts’ giving advice on how to make cheap and tasty meals and how to cope with the food shortages. The aim was to help people make the best of what was available, and one of the recipes, using vegetables, no meat and a little fat, was for Woolton pie. Although some were helpful, many of the food leaflets became known as bumf (i.e. bum fodder) and ended up hung on a loop of string in the village lavs. Mrs Harris listened regularly to the five-minute wireless programme called The Kitchen Front that was broadcast at 8.15 a.m. from Tuesday to Friday, while Dot would stand at the sink washing the breakfast dishes; when she was finished we set off for school.

  During the half-term holiday Mam, Aunt Hilda and Uncle John paid a short visit. Jimmy and I enjoyed being seen with our Uncle John as he was now sporting sergeant’s stripes on his army uniform that had knife-edged creases. Being in the forces gave a man standing and Gran felt proud to sew the stripes on for him. He was on embarkation leave again and his battalion had been in training near Dorchester and in the Cheddar Gorge area. On seeing the long list of dos and don’ts pinned up on the Harrises’ kitchen cabinet he said, ‘It’s worse than being in a prisoner of war camp.’ The belts and cane that usually hung there had disappeared and his words were to prove to be prophetic. He told us that during the recent snowstorms, ‘Our platoon got cut off at the notorious Porlock Hill and we had to dig our way out to get back to camp.’

  Each time Mam had to go it became more and more heart-rending for both of us, and just before leaving, she held me close and cuddled me into the warmth of her well-rounded bosom. Tears welled up in her eyes and in my mind’s eye I can still see the red double-decker bus, with its advertisement for Tower Ales distorted by my tears, as it left for York. That night, and every night, I knelt by the side of the bed and prayed to God asking him to keep Mammy and Daddy safe until the war was over so that I could go home with them again.

  Pointing out where Libya was on the large world map, Miss Curry told the assembled school that, ‘British and Australian troops under the command of General Wavell have carried out a surprise attack capturing the port of Tobruk and, during the advance, over 25,000 Italians have been taken prisoner. This great success has helped us to secure the eastern Mediterranean.’ Being so young and with the fighting so far away we felt safe here and the facts did not really register. We thought that it was all very exciting and Miss Curry kept us up to date on the fluctuating progress of the war. It was one of very few successes up to that time and, as such, the news was gladly received by
the people of Haxby.

  9

  Village Life and People

  That February there were several keen frosts with deep snow lying on the fields and, on the Monday of our half-term holiday, a bone-invading chill crept under the back door and slid across the floor before climbing up our backs. Being washday, condensation misted the windowpanes, distorting the view of the back garden as it streamed down wetting and lifting the edges of the criss-crossed anti-blast tape. The kitchen was the centre of most of the household activity and articles of damp laundry hung everywhere, blocking off any warmth from the fire and adding moisture to the choking fug already caused by Mrs Harris’s constant cigarette smoking. She coughed and wheezed as the blue smoke curled up towards the brown tobacco-stained ceiling. The heavy dankness, which hung like a sullen cloud, made us feel listless and lethargic.

  Rousing ourselves with an effort, Thelma, Dot, Jimmy, Ducky and I put on our warmest clothes and got the wooden sledge from the garden shed. Mr Harris, who was at work on the farm, had made it in his spare time. We were glad to get out to breathe the clear, sharp, frosty air, which lifted us out of our stupor. Blinking like emerging moles, we came out into the weak sunshine that shone from a cloudless, pale-blue sky and, being low on the horizon at that time of year, it cast long shadows. As we crossed Usher Lane with great care, the icy wind blew the cobwebs from our minds. The surface of the road glittered and sparkled like diamonds as the sun glinted off it and every roof and hedge was white with hoarfrost.

  We made our way beside thorn hedges to the frozen Windmill pond that lay at the far side of a snow-covered turnip field, and there was a hard glistening layer of ice on top of the deep snowdrifts. Beside the pond, which we were told was bottomless, stood an old, rusting irrigation pump with its twisted metal vanes creaking and groaning as they turned slowly in the bitterly cold north-east wind. The surface of the pond was frozen solid and we skittered about on it in our hobnailed boots, landing on our backsides more often than we stayed on our feet. For a while we took turns on the sledge, two at a time, while the others held the rope and pulled it along. We whizzed up and down trying not to crash into the crowds of villagers on the ice; most of whom were floundering about and falling down just like us.