Nobbut a Lad Read online

  At all times men walked on the outside of the pavement, ladies on the inside. I still do, even though it does sometimes cause confusion when after crossing the road, the woman I am walking with discovers that I’m not where I was. It’s not that we ever made a big thing of it; it was taken for granted. It still is.

  When we went out for walks on a Sunday, Dad wore a collar and tie, his new grey gaberdine coat and his best cap; my mum, my sister and I wore coats that Mum had made – only Dad’s was bought from Greenwood’s.

  Under the shade of the flowering currant bush by the back door, and next door to Dad’s bike, which was leaned against the back wall of the house and shrouded in a bit of old stair carpet, I’d be parked in my pram to take the air; fastened in with a pair of reins to stop me from climbing over the side. While Mum busied herself in the back kitchen, I could squint in the bright sunlight at the blackbird nesting in the sycamore tree that grew only slightly higher than the stone-built midden, and stare wide-eyed at Dennis Petty, the black-faced coalman, as he lifted up the iron grating and rattled the contents of his half-hundredweight sacks down the chute that led to the cellar. A plume of black dust would spiral into the air as each sack went from being plump to empty, and the sneezes that followed would cloud my eyes with tears.

  Every day I could watch Podgy, the black-and-white cat from two doors up, as he stalked the blackbird (he could never move fast enough to catch it, but then he wasn’t called Podgy for nothing), and once a week be terrified by the noise and smell of the pigswill man.

  Old Mr Petty, Dennis’s dad, would come in his wellies and overalls to empty the short, fat, metal bins that sat next to the dustbins down the back, where people put their potato peelings, stale bread and leftover food. Not that there was a lot of that. Plates were cleared at most meals. He’d tip the contents of the bins into a larger one with a handle that he would then heave up on to his back, and walk past my pram leaving the sickly-sweet stench of pigswill hovering in the air, to mix with the acrid tang of the bruised currant leaves that his shoulder had caught rounding the corner. I never saw his pigs; I think he kept them down by the allotments.

  In that no-man’s-land between the backyard and the garden – ‘the back’ – there would be comings and goings all day long. Wives and widows going out to the shops in their thick coats, with dark felt hats held on with huge pins. Kids would learn to ride their bikes here, bumping over the uneven ground that sloped from the top of the back to the bottom and sometimes landing in the hedges that fronted the small back gardens where cabbages grew, and Brussels sprouts. There were savoys and sometimes a few onions, but never leeks or marrows or anything remotely exotic – only ‘greens’. You knew where you were with them and they kept you regular.

  There were no lawns, just patches of rough grass where a pram could be parked, or a painted kitchen chair perched on the hottest days of summer when top buttons of blouses would be undone and a glass of orange squash would take the place of tea. Neither were there elaborate flower borders, just the odd rose bush or hydrangea or maybe a couple of overgrown blackcurrant bushes. A bit of honeysuckle might run up into a scrawny tree and scent the air with its heavy perfume when spring turned into summer.

  The Cawoods had a large Bramley apple tree; the Dinsdales had enough old floorboards and planks to start a timber yard; and Mr Barker had a shed for his motorbike and sidecar, and a miniature version for his tortoises, Tommy and Thomas.

  Other gardens were dark and mysterious – their privet hedges having long since grown outwards and skywards to swallow up the narrow strip of land, and at the end of the nine houses, at the very bottom of the back loomed the orange brick wall of Ledgard’s bus garage.

  The blue-and-black buses and coaches would come and go at the beginning and end of the day – off to Leeds and Bradford, Otley and Skipton. Samuel Ledgard’s double-deckers were not as luxurious as the bright-red ones of the West Yorkshire Road Car Company, who operated from the centre of town, but their coaches, said my mum, were ‘much comfier’.

  Next to the bus garage, in the end house, lived Mrs Beaumont, who looked a hundred and fifty. She wasn’t much taller than us kids, her teeth were long gone, and she wore a black dress that reached down to the ground, with a large white apron and a mob cap like some serving woman from an Elizabethan banquet. She never said much, and when she did, it was usually to tell an unwanted caller to go away. I tried to be nice to her once, in that eager-to-please, childish sort of way. Nothing too earnest, just a smile and a hello. She told me to piss off, so I did, trying not to feel crushed. Some weeks afterwards she retreated into the house and quietly died.

  Mrs Lettern was next up; a widow with horn-rimmed glasses and a spiky felt hat; a bit dour and almost as antisocial as Mrs Beaumont. Then came the Cawoods, an old couple with several grown-up children and the youngest, Pauline, who at my age was obviously a late arrival. It seemed odd that Pauline’s mum and dad were so old, when mine were so young – just 25 when I was born. Mr Cawood was particularly shaky on his pins, and in September you could see his wife in her floral pinny, with her grey forties-style hair, steadying his bottom as he stood on a chair below the apple tree and hooked down the fruit with the handle of his walking stick. I was convinced that one day he’d fall and break his neck. That’s what you did when you fell out of an apple tree. In the end he died of natural causes. It was all a bit disappointing.

  The Evanses had a boy and a girl – Winton (grammar school and a bit aloof) and Jane (keen on ballet but no threat to Fonteyn). The Barkers next door to them were childless – she a martyr to nervous headaches, and he a special constable who directed traffic on bank-holiday weekends. (I burned my leg on his motorbike radiator and had to have soap rubbed on it to take away the sting. It didn’t work.)

  Then came the Pettys – Dennis, the coalman with the black face, and Joan his wife, with ash-blonde hair and skirts that my mother said were far too short. My dad said nothing. I could see him smiling behind the Daily Express. Mrs Petty looked like Gaye Gambol. Their daughter, Virginia, with hair not quite as blonde as her mum’s and longer skirts, was my first girlfriend. The first one who bought me a Christmas present, anyway – a box of New Berry Fruits. I think she ran up to Thornber’s – the top shop (as opposed to Morgan’s, the bottom shop) – to get them after I’d sent her a box of Maltesers. But it didn’t matter that it was an afterthought. At least she cared enough to bother.

  Mrs Cunnington was next door to us. She was a dumpling of a woman and a widow by the time I was six or seven. She was also our favourite neighbour – kindly and warm, with a nice line in hums. She knew when my mother had stood me in the corner for being naughty because she could hear me kicking the skirting board.

  ‘Have-it’s in trouble again,’ she’d mutter to herself. She called me ‘Have-it’ when I was little on account of my fascination with her trinkets. Mrs Cunnington had a lot of knick-knacks, towards which I would totter with arms outstretched saying, ‘Have it. Have it.’

  ‘Cookie’ she was always called, apparently because I couldn’t say ‘Cunnington’ when I was little. As a result, the entire street called her ‘Cookie’. She was, said my mother, a cockney from Croydon (to my mother, anyone who lived south of Derby was a cockney), and though she had lived in Yorkshire for most of her life, her accent was still that of a Londoner. ‘All right, duck?’ she’d ask. And when someone was cross, she’d say, ‘He played Hamlet,’ or, ‘He played billy-o’; expressions that were clearly not of Yorkshire origin.

  She had a brother called Rex who came to see her occasionally. He wore bow ties, had rimless glasses and a grey moustache and spoke posh, and his wife – ‘Verie’, never Vera – hardly ever spoke to us. I think we were a bit beneath her. She lived in Harrogate.

  Cookie was an amazing shape. She was not so much round as amorphous. Her breasts were large but undefined and, under the grey cardigan she always wore, they disappeared into her hips. It seems unkind to describe her like this, but as a child her anatomy g
ave me cause for much curiosity. Her legs came out of the bottom of a full skirt held at some distance from them by her pannier-like hips, and were usually terminated by a pair of brown slippers with a pompom on each foot. I caught a glimpse of her knees once. They erupted above the short stockings that were held in place with elastic, and looked like a collection of white apples in a small sack. Her hair was grey and fastened into a hairnet at the back with kirby grips, and she had glasses and a rather squashed face. But she was kind – a bit like a favourite granny – and babysat for me and my sister when Mum and Dad fancied a night out. When she kissed you goodnight, her skin was soft and warm, not cold and prickly like some of Dad’s aunties. He had seven of them, and Auntie Ethel was the prickliest in temperament as well as kiss.

  Cookie’s husband – ‘Cookin’ – died when I was little, so for the majority of my childhood she lived alone, sitting in a huge wooden Windsor chair alongside the big black range in her front room, where she’d bake bread and heat up the kettle in between making rag rugs and taking cuttings of busy Lizzies.

  We had a range, too, when we first arrived at Nelson Road, but it was soon replaced with a small fireplace made of mottled cream tiles. Cookie’s room always seemed warmer somehow, and friendlier, but we were much more up to date.

  She didn’t do much with her garden (‘It’s my hips, duck’), but she was a dab hand with the plants on her windowsill. There were spider plants and succulents – money plants and partridge-breasted aloes that she called ‘my pheasant’s breast’ – and a forest of busy Lizzies. Cookie was the first person I knew who had green fingers. She was forever rooting cuttings in jars of water on her windowsill, and starting off new spider plants by pegging their plantlets into a circle of smaller pots around the mother plant – holding them in place with one of her hairpins. She gave potfuls to friends and church bazaars, progeny of the monster that sat on the what-not a few feet back from the windowsill – the windowsill that was really a miniature greenhouse, where the light squinted through, dappled by the leaves of her flourishing jungle.

  On the other side of us, in the top house of our lump of terrace, a Scottish family lived for a short while, to be replaced by the Dinsdales and their ever-expanding brood. The Dinsdales had married in their teens, to sharp intakes of breath and sideways glances from the neighbours. Their children were still arriving long after I’d left home. Gerry – bearded and with the suntanned torso of a Greek god when he dug his vegetable patch – was the best whistler in the town. You could hear him coming from the top of the street. He used to lean out of his upstairs toilet window with an airgun to shoot the sparrows that ate his peas. Mum wasn’t happy about this and she complained to my father: ‘Alan, tell him off. He’ll have somebody’s eye out.’ He never did.

  I watched from the comfort of my sister’s bedroom window; in awe of his prowess with the gun, but saddened at the sight of the little grey-and-brown birds toppling off the gutter of his garden shed and landing with a puff of dust on the sun-baked earth below. Half of me wanted to have a go myself; the other half wanted to snatch the airgun from him.

  Gerry would join in with our games sometimes – kicking a ball about or generally being silly. The other parents in the street were a bit sniffy about this and thought he should grow up. We were glad that he didn’t.

  Winnie, his wife, had one of the loudest voices I’ve ever heard and was inordinately fond of the word ‘bugger’. But my mother (who never swore, except to repeat what somebody else had said, which she did with some relish) said she had a good heart.

  Beyond the top house of our terrace, the back cut through to the front, bordered by a high stone wall. On the other side of it lived the Forrests and their children – a Catholic family – he a joiner, whose brother owned the local removal firm, she a housewife with a sing-song voice and a capacity to burst into tears at the most minor of domestic misfortunes. I listened time without number as a hysterical Mrs Forrest, sounding like an operatic heroine in full flood, regaled me at breakneck speed with the disaster that had befallen her daughter Philomena on that particular day. I never understood a word of it – so fast did the words come, and in such a high-pitched coloratura – and then she’d rush back indoors, wringing her hands in her pinny all the while, slam the door, and shriek up the stairs to some child to come down and have its tea, or shut up and get into bed. The air had a spectacular stillness when Mrs Forrest’s voice died away.

  The high spot of Tommy Forrest’s life was when he met the Pope. A neighbour pointed to a photo of the two of them in the Ilkley Gazette and asked, ‘Who’s that with Tommy Forrest?’

  Across from us were the Hudsons and the Feathers, the Gells and the Phillipses and, in the middle house, Mr Smith, the chimney sweep, who smoked a pipe and had a gold watch chain.

  It was in the road between the hosues that we played most of the time: me and Mickey Hudson, Stephen Feather and Robert Petty, Ralph Clayton and ‘Dokey’ Gell. His name was Donald, but everybody called him ‘Dokey’. He was older than the rest of us, and quickly grew out of our childish games – kick-can, a livelier version of hide-and-seek; cricket with the wicket chalked on the bus-garage wall; and football with only one goal.

  There was little danger from passing cars – nobody had one. Not until my dad got his van when I was nine or ten. Dennis Petty, the coalman, had a lorry, and Stanley Hudson had his greengrocer’s van, but they were hardly ever in evidence.

  Nothing much happened in our street. At least, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Early memories are deceptive and sometimes triggered by photographs, so that you kid yourself you can remember a particular event that exists only in a faded snapshot. Which may be why I think I can remember my grandfather walking me, aged about one and a half, between the rows of sweet peas on his allotment down by the river. He is dressed in his waistcoat and trilby, with a tie, and there are silvery lids of Cadbury’s cocoa tins dangling on strings to frighten away the sparrows. I am dressed in baggy bloomers and a bit of a girly top. But I can see the rest of that allotment in my mind’s eye …

  The Allotments

  It never occurred to me when I was little that allotments were anything less than glamorous places. Grandad Hardisty’s was not situated in some grimy city backwater – a piece of reclaimed waste ground. Instead, it was on the south bank of the River Wharfe, and sloped gently down towards the water. You couldn’t reach the river with your watering can – there was a fence and a pathway in between – but you could hear the sound of water, and of the birds that sang in the weeping willows that towered over the bank and dangled their feathery wands into the slow-moving current. If you raised your eyes and looked up from the water, you could see Middleton Woods and, beyond them, one or two red-tiled house roofs peeping through the trees. A blissful spot. A happy spot. I imagined that all allotments were like this – places of escape, places of peace and solitude.

  Grandad’s plot was nothing out of the ordinary when it came to features. He had nothing as grand as a greenhouse, like some of the others. Not that they had proper ‘bought’ greenhouses with pitched roofs. The greenhouses on the allotments were cobbled together from old window frames. The flat roof would have a gentle slope in one direction so that it could shed the rain, and there would be some sort of fabricated door on rusty hinges to allow access. An old oil drum would be propped up on lumps of flagstone at one corner to catch the rain. If you were lucky, one of the windows would open to allow ventilation; if it did not, then you opened the door, or you cooked in summer, along with your tomatoes. In Yorkshire in the 1950s, no one grew tomatoes outside; they’d have perished in the chilly air if they’d been planted before mid-June, and with the frosts coming in September that didn’t give you much time to mature the crop. No, tomatoes were greenhouse plants, and being of such a tender and snooty disposition, were probably a bit scornful of the structures on the allotments that the owners were pleased to call greenhouses.

  Patches of polythene would be tacked in place where
a carelessly wielded spade had smashed a pane of glass, and none of the window frames would be the same colour. It seemed that they were a hotch-potch of three shades of Brolac – white, cream and ‘council-house green’.

  These little crystal palaces were Heath Robinson attempts at protected cultivation, and the sheds were generally of the same sort of design, though one or two of them had the luxury of a veranda – courtesy of old floorboards and some barley-twist banisters that had been pulled out of a house that was going ‘contemporary’.

  Mr Emmett had the plot next door to Grandad. He was a dour man with a flat cap and horn-rimmed glasses and a face that seemed to be permanently folded. If you said hello to him, he’d grunt, but he’d never look up.

  He seemed only to grow vegetables that were as serious as he was – long-maturing root crops like parsnips and swedes, savoy cabbages and red cabbages and beetroots. There was never anything as frivolous as a lettuce or a spring onion, and Mr Emmett never seemed to evince any pleasure in harvesting anything, even when he was cycling home with his vegetables propped on the handlebars.

  Grandad’s allotment was different. It was friendly, like he was – an allotment that as well as growing vegetables for the pot, grew a few flowers for Grandma to put in a cut-glass vase in the front room: pale-blue scabious, pink and white sweet williams and long rows of sweet peas trained up rows of beanpoles.

  At the bottom end of the patch were three or four old brass bedsteads fastened with twisted wire to lengths of rusty angle-iron that had been hammered into the soil as posts. Over them were trained the spiny stems of blackberries – their fruits could be pressed into your mouth by the fistful if you could avoid the tiny thorns that become impossible to remove once bedded in the soft skin of your fingers. I learned, early on, to pick them carefully, and to try not to stain my clothes for fear of a slap on the back of the legs from my mum. I’d pull the four corners of my hanky together (I think I was born with one in my left-hand trouser pocket) to make a bag, and drop them in it. Their juice would come through and stain the white cotton, but she didn’t mind too much about that. As allotment features go, there are few that are more decorative than a row of blackberries trained over brass bedsteads – the knobs poking through and gleaming gold in the summer sun.