'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, circling 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 agreeing 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.
Traditional pastimes survived long after we had put away the pogo-sticks and spinning tops. During the week after tea and with homework finished, I would be out on the street to meet my friends, Jimmy Everett, Terry Gaunt and Michael Wales. Richard Road was a steep hill and in summer we would race down on roller skates or on bicycles or, even better, on 'bogies', those crude trolleys we built from old pram wheels and slats of wood with a rope to steer. Mr Fowler, who lived at the top of the hill, made me and my friends catapults and we played for hours firing at tins and bottles until the offensive weapons were confiscated by Mr Wales (no relation to Michael), a teacher who lived a few doors away from me. When we broke a window in his greenhouse we owned up (we really had no choice, because he was in the garden at the time), apologized and asked him not to tell our parents. He took the catapults from us with the injunction, 'You could take somebody's eye out with one of these,' but never did tell our parents or ask us to pay for the damage. A week later he presented us with a large bag of marbles. We would then retire to the top of Ramsden Road to battle it out.
In autumn it was conker time. We would collect bags of conkers from Clifton Park, soak them in vinegar, bake them in the oven, leave them in the airing cupboard for a year, carefully skewer them and then spend hours competing in the street and in the playground. Children throughout the country tried to perfect the killer conker, and these hard shiny brown nuts were pickled, boiled, baked, varnished and pampered. The big round ones were not the best. They were soft and yielding and easy targets. We all looked for small, flat, sharp-edged specimens. I learnt about schadenfreude early on. It was such a pleasure to see a champion conker that had survived twenty or more battles smashed to smithereens by a newcomer, to be greeted by wild cheers from the onlookers.
In winter we would pray for snow so that we could position ourselves at the brow of the hill and sledge down at high speed. There were no trainers, denim jeans or bomber jackets in those days. We were kitted out in Wellington boots, hand-knitted jumpers, old school flannels, duffel coats and knitted woollen balaclava helmets (close-fitting hats covering the whole of the head and encircling the neck). The posh children had balaclavas made out of leather with a fur lining. My brother's was made of simulated leather, an unyielding pale brown plastic with a felt lining, and when I sneaked it out of his cupboard one winter it made me feel like Biggles as I sped down Richard Road on my sledge, shrieking at the top of my voice. We became skilled at steering the sledge on to the pavement just as we reached the bottom, because ahead was the busy Broom Valley Road and the Cowrakes Lane buses.
Of course if there was snow there would be snowmen and snowball fights. One snowman carefully sculpted in the front garden by a father for his little boy was something of a masterpiece. It stood six foot high, with chips of coal for the eyes, a carrot for the nose and a crescent of apple for the mouth. One evening one of the boys on the street rearranged the creation and the next morning, on our way to school, we passed a leering, one-armed figure. The carrot had been repositioned lower down to form a very prominent orange penis, above which was a tuft of grass for the pubic hair. The child's father, incensed by such vandalism, called on all the houses in the street to try to discover the culprit.
I abandoned cricket early on in my childhood. It was Uncle Alec, on one of his rare visits, who attempted to teach me the rudiments of the game when I was eight or nine years old, but his tuition didn't last above three coaching sessions. I have to own that I couldn't really take to the game. I failed to understand why anyone could enjoy hitting a really hard ball flying at great speed towards them with a stiff piece of wood so that someone else could run up and down. Uncle Alec, who loved cricket and played for the Royal Air Force, had had great success with my brother Michael (brother Alec just wasn't bothered), who went on to become a very skilful player, but after lesson number three with me, Uncle Alec gave it up as a bad job. I was an unwilling pupil and useless to boot and, unlike my eldest brother, had no ambition to play for Yorkshire. After the last and memorable session Uncle Alec returned to our house with his very apologetic nephew in tow and the appearance of one who had just clambered out of the boxing ring. My batting technique, despite my uncle's coaching, was to wield the bat like a deadly weapon as the ball approa
ched, thrashing the air madly and leaping up and down. My bowling technique would have put the fear of God into a regiment of Gurkhas. In this, the last of my coaching sessions, I managed to crack the ball with such accuracy and speed that it hit my poor uncle smack in the face, dislodging a couple of teeth. In my poem, written some years later, I recorded the incident but do have to admit to a little poetic licence:
Unlucky Uncle Alec
When one day playing cricket,
Saw a four-leaf clover
And thought that he would pick it.
As he bent down
Towards the ground
To pluck the lucky leaf,
The cricket ball
Flew through the air
And knocked out all his teeth.
He shouted, 'Drat!'
And dropped the bat
Which landed on his toes.
It bounced back up
And cracked his chin
Then smacked him on the nose.
Smeared in blood
And caked in mud,
He said, 'I'm glad that's over.'
Then with a sigh
He held up high
His lucky four-leaf-clover.
I was not allowed to play out on Sunday morning because there was church. In the evening, homework completed, the time would be spent before bedtime completing a huge jigsaw of Westminster Bridge or the Cutty Sark, or playing snakes and ladders, draughts or chess with my brothers, or carefully painting in the little shapes in the 'Painting by Numbers' set. Then there was the John Bull printing set with the little rubber letters and ink pad. And sometimes I would spend many a happy hour patiently gluing together the plastic components of model aircraft - Spitfires and Hurricanes, Messerschmitts and Fokkers - then laboriously painting them using little tins of enamel paint and finally sticking on the transfers. However hard I read the instructions there was always a part left over at the end. I reckoned that the makers of the models did it on purpose.
Road to the Dales, The Story of a Yorkshire Lad Page 25