Nobbut a Lad Read online

  In the early days the engine was open and the firemen stood on long steps that ran down the side of the scarlet-and-chrome ‘appliance’, as Dad called it. A huge ladder sloped upwards from the back of the engine to the front, terminating in two enormous cartwheels. If we were home from school, we’d run down the road to see if the engine came our way, waving at Dad in his tall fireman’s hat as he clung on with one hand and fastened the chrome buttons of his thick navy-blue tunic with the other. The man seated next to the driver rang the big silver bell, and those with a free hand waved back as the gleaming machine hurtled down the road, the clanging bell eventually receding into the distance.

  While fairly fleet of foot himself, Dad was not as driven as some of the retained firemen. He was especially scathing of Philip Dobson – smaller even than Dad – who wore black pumps all the time when he was at home, the better to increase the speed of his sprint. He lived only a street away from the fire station, so he had a head start when it came to making the engine. I felt sorry for his wife, a rather sad-looking lady called Maureen. If Philip happened to be drinking a cup of coffee, or having his tea on his lap in front of the fire, at the sound of the bell or the buzzer, up would go the plate or the cup – tossed in the air in the interest of speed – and his wife would be left to clean up the mess while he shot off like a greyhound from a trap.

  ‘Daft,’ was Dad’s only remark.

  We never stopped for a moment to consider the implications of Dad being a fireman. Certainly Mum never spoke about it. But she must have worried. Not about the chimney fires, or when he had to rescue cats from up trees. But Ilkley is near the mill towns of Keighley and Silsden, and when there was a mill fire, our men would be called in as reinforcements.

  Mill fires invariably happened at night, and we’d all be woken by the bell in the early hours of the morning. I’d stir, and see the narrow shaft of light below my bedroom door that showed Dad was up and about to go. I’d turn over and go back to sleep without a thought for his safety. He never seemed to worry about it, so why should I? Then one Sunday morning he said it was time I saw what he did.

  There had been a call-out during the previous Friday night, and I was aware that by Saturday morning Dad was still not back. Mum said that it was a mill fire in Keighley, and that they were still trying to put it out. At four in the afternoon, Dad returned, worn out and blackened with soot.

  For the first time there was something in his eyes that I did not recognise, apart from the bone-weariness that seemed to have overtaken his body. I suppose, on reflection, that it was fear. Mum went up and hugged him, in spite of the fact that his face and hands were filthy. I thought it was odd; Mum always made Dad wash his hands before he gave her ‘a love’ when he came home from work. Today she didn’t bother, just buried her head in his neck and held him tight. I went out of the back kitchen and into the garden; at moments like this I knew to leave them alone, and anyway, it was embarrassing.

  On the Sunday morning he bundled us into the van and drove up through Steeton and Silsden to the outskirts of Keighley. There, at the side of the road, was a hole, an enormous hole, where two days previously a woollen mill had stood. Now there was hardly anything left of it. The outer stone walls, once robust and sturdy, had caved inwards into a gigantic pit. At the bottom of the pit was a confused tangle of machinery and masonry. But the thing that made the greatest impression were the gigantic steel girders that had once held the floors of the mill. They must have been three feet wide, but they were twisted and tangled and knotted like spaghetti on top of the smouldering wreckage. So great was the heat that they had buckled and melted, allowing the entire building to fall in on itself.

  I turned to look at Dad, who was gazing silently at the wreckage. The dampness of steam and the rank odour of smouldering, saturated wool lay heavily on the air.

  ‘Where were you?’ I asked.

  Dad pointed to the other side of the building. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘On top of a ladder. I just kept pointing my hose at the flames.’

  ‘Was it hot?’

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘How long did they take to go out?’

  ‘Twelve hours.’

  He didn’t seem to want to talk any more, so I stopped asking questions. After that, whenever the fire buzzer went off or the bell rang at the bottom of our stairs, I felt uneasy until my dad was safely back in the house and life was returned to normal.

  I never thought of him as a hero. It was just what he did. But Mum was unusually quiet whenever he was out at a fire. She knew there was an ever-present danger and a real risk of loss of life. It had happened to other firemen in nearby stations; if I’d taken the trouble to interpret her mood, I might have been more worried than I was.

  That my mother loved my father deeply I never doubted. Apart from her flirting with other men – which didn’t amount to more than a lowering of the eyelids and a coy note in her voice – she never had eyes for anyone else. I never heard them swapping terms of endearment, or saw them being overly demonstrative in public apart from holding hands when we went out for a walk, but every evening when Dad came home from work and my sister and I were playing in the front room, the door between the front room and the kitchen would be closed and we would hear the muffled sound of Mum and Dad telling each other the gossip of the day, interspersed with the occasional kiss. Each morning, when she’d made his ‘packing’ – sandwiches and a boiled egg wrapped in waxed paper, a Penguin biscuit and a flask of tea neatly fitted into the khaki canvas bag that he slung over his shoulder – they’d hug and have the regulation three kisses before he left: two short ones and a long one on the lips. They never minded us seeing that.

  She hated him being ill. He caught pneumonia just after my sister was born and was chivvied by my mother into being well again. Later on in life he had a heart scare and the nurses in the hospital used to dread the effect that my mother’s visit would have on his blood pressure. She didn’t mean to be unkind; she just needed him to be at home with her. That she exasperated him there is no doubt. She was not always reasonable in her demands. But they fitted together with the comfortableness of two people who knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and who also knew, from the day they married in 1947, that they would be together for the rest of their lives. It was taken for granted.

  Every now and then he’d look at her and wink and say, ‘All right, Beff?’ and she’d nod and smile at him with a sparkle in her eyes. They’d go on Wallace Arnold coach tours later in life, when my sister and I had flown the nest. They liked the Forest of Dean best, and once were daring enough to go to Austria. Arthritic by now, Mum had a little metal shield with ‘Steinach’ nailed on to her walking stick as a memento.

  When Dad died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-two in 1986, her world fell apart, and until her own death in 2002, at the age of seventy-eight, she had no interest in any other man. But then, as she told the vicar at Dad’s funeral, ‘He was the best thing that ever happened to me.’ It was as simple as that.

  A lack of inches did little for my confidence. I was shorter than the other boys right from the start, and I struggled for years to believe that I was here for any other reason than to make up the numbers – a belief reinforced by the fact that along with the fat boy I was always the last one to be picked in the line-up for the football team. My lack of confidence didn’t manifest itself in chippiness; instead, it translated into chirpiness, which to those around me must have been even more irritating. It was nothing more than an attempt to prove that I was just one of them, even if I didn’t really feel that I was. My lasting memories of junior school and secondary school are of being told to shut up. My crime, if anything, was that of being too enthusiastic.

  Even my earliest school experiences came as a bit of a shock. Mum clearly loved me; I knew that, even though ‘I love you’ was not a phrase that was ever used in our house. We weren’t that soft. But if she did love me, why didn’t she want to be with me all day? It was a puzzle.

&n
bsp; Skewell

  Before I started school, I was packed off three or four days a week to the state-run nursery down by the allotments. It was a pre-war prefab, staffed by a few kindly ladies who let us paint a lot and insisted that we rest on canvas stretchers after lunch, when all we really wanted to do was run around.

  There was only one compensation as far as I was concerned: after the early-afternoon doze on the stretcher, and a brief breath of fresh air wearing sun hats to stop us from getting freckles, they combed my hair and dipped the comb in water to give my fringe a quiff. If they forgot, I used to remind them. My mum always admired it when she came to take me home, but she never had the knack of recreating that particular style, however hard she tried. At home, I lived with the floppy fringe.

  Six months later things were completely different. There were no early-afternoon dozes and quiffs at Ilkley New County Infants, down Leeds Road. This was a proper school, newly built from local sandstone and run by the severe headmistress Miss Howker.

  Mrs Osman took the first class – she seemed as old as God with her long, white hair, and wore a floral-print overall in which she floated about the classroom. Her frame was as slight as a wraith, and her voice was reedy – frequently breaking into another octave when she tried to raise the volume, which she did, it seemed, every couple of minutes.

  ‘I’m going to draw something on the blackboard now and you’re going to tell me what it is,’ she would croak.

  Hands would shoot up all over the classroom.

  ‘It’s a beetle, miss.’

  ‘No, miss, it’s a spider.’

  Mrs Osman would look crestfallen.

  ‘No. It’s a sheep.’

  We tried our best not to look disbelieving. She was a nice lady, though no Elisabeth Frink, and we didn’t want to disappoint her.

  ‘And what do sheep say?’

  ‘Bugger all,’ muttered Buster Stirk.

  ‘No, Buster. They say, “Baaa.”

  And so it is that whenever I think of Mrs Osman and her creaky, croaky voice, I think of sheep bleating.

  In charge of the second year was the young and athletic Miss Outersides with well-developed calves and a mane of dark-brown hair – a sort of Eileen Fowler for infants. Whatever the weather, Miss Outersides wore a brown tweed skirt and white pumps, equipping her all the better to run after some recalcitrant child bent on going home early. You’d frequently see her bounding figure flashing past the classroom window. She ran silently, thanks to the pumps, and was adept at capturing her escaping charge just before he made the painted iron gates that opened on to the outside world. The ear would usually be the first point of contact, but Miss Outersides had a knack of never inflicting pain – just remorse.

  Where Mrs Osman creaked and croaked, Miss Outersides boomed. I suppose she was just out of college, and her enthusiasm, coupled with her athletic bearing, drove her through the school like a brisk breeze. When she read us a story, late in the afternoon, her brisk delivery meant that it wasn’t so much a fairy tale, more an instruction manual.

  The third class was taken by dark-haired Mrs Smith, who had a snooty daughter called Roberta who went to a posh school somewhere else. She came in every now and again at the end of the day, and could turn her head so fast that her long plaits could sting your eyes. She was very good at sweeping off in a huff. I don’t know why. Maybe she just resented being there. Mrs Smith’s husband had a bubble car, and sometimes he’d come and collect the two of them at the end of the afternoon. This was when Roberta got her come-uppance. It’s difficult to be indignant when you’re sitting in the back of a bubble car.

  Miss Howker herself took charge of the seniors, who would be all of seven years old. She was a no-nonsense matriarch who gave the appearance of having a leg at each corner, and while not exactly having a ready temper, her look alone could stop a six-year-old hooligan in his tracks. Not for her the floral-print overall or the speedy white pumps. Miss Howker wore a pleated skirt, a navy-blue jumper and pearls. Without fail. She had glasses that she would look over to silence an unwanted conversation, and an invitation to see her in her office would cause the colour to drain from the face of the toughest young lad. It was said that she had a stick.

  Number 9 Dean Street abutted on to the school playing field, but I don’t remember seeing much of Grandma and Auntie Alice, even on washing day; instead, I remember sports days and endless games of the farmer’s in his den with Mrs Tillotson, the portly dinner lady. She looked like a farmer’s wife herself, and we all loved her. She minded our manners while we ate and, if we were reluctant, spooned the last few mouthfuls of some sickly dessert into our unwilling mouths. She’d make up for this immediately afterwards by taking us out into the playground. Sometimes, if one or two of us were feeling a bit off colour, she’d let us hold her hand. One sports day my mum had turned up late, holding a hanky over her mouth. She’d been to the dentist to have a tooth out and so couldn’t join in the parents’ race. She couldn’t even speak. She just shook her head and then, after all the races, she went home before I did. I was disappointed. I knew that if she’d joined in, she’d have won. She was a good runner.

  Mrs Tillotson spotted my sadness and came over to the chain-link fencing where I stood, watching my mum, hanky clutched to face, walking home without me. Mrs Tillotson took my hand and led me back across the thick green grass towards the tarmac playground where the other kids were playing happily.

  ‘Never mind. Here … I’ve got something for you.’ She dipped her hand into her pocket and brought out a single lead soldier. It was nothing special. A bit battered. Just a soldier in khaki standing to attention, his hat so worn that the shiny grey lead was showing through.

  ‘Would you like it?’ she asked.

  I nodded and murmured, ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Go on, then. You keep it.’ She took my hand again and walked me towards the school. ‘It reminds me of my son. He’s in the army. Doing national service. Out in Malaya.’

  ‘Oh.’ I didn’t know what national service was, except that it sounded important. Mrs Tillotson went quiet for a bit, and then she said, ‘Let’s play the farmer’s in his den.’

  Soon we had all linked hands and begun to walk round in a circle, as Mrs Tillotson in her quavering soprano began the chant: ‘The farmer’s in his den, the farmer’s in his den, ee-eye-enjy-o, the farmer’s in his den,’ we sang as we walked around in a circle, vying to be the ones who held Mrs Tillotson’s hand, rather than those who were spirited into the centre of the circle to play the named parts of farmer, wife, dog and bone. Woe betide you if you got to be the bone given to the farmer’s dog. The last verse was ‘We all pat the bone’, and the game usually ended with ‘the bone’ suffering mild concussion. Other than that, life at infant school was not especially risky, except for encounters with Kitty Oldacre and rhubarb and custard.

  Kitty was small and blonde with dark eyebrows and a winning smile. She seemed to wear party frocks every day and I looked at her in wonder and amazement, until the day she decided to clean out her left nostril with the pompom on her lemon-yellow cardigan.

  ‘Kitty Oldacre, stop that,’ warned Mrs Smith. ‘You do not use your pompom to remove nose dirt.’

  I never knew why she didn’t just say ‘snot’, but I never looked at Kitty Oldacre in the same way after that. And I didn’t look at rhubarb and custard either. Not after Mrs Tillotson stood over me while I finished it off. It tasted sour.

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ I said.

  ‘No you’re not. It’s just nerves. Now get those last few mouthfuls down and then we’ll go out and play, there’s a good boy.’

  By this time I was the only child left in the cavernous school hall, and the hands on the clock with the coloured numbers high up on the wall were showing playtime ticking away.

  I did my best with that rhubarb, and I did, in the end, get it all down. But in spite of Mrs Tillotson’s encouragement, and in spite of the fact that I wanted to please her, it was all to no avail. W
ithin seconds the rhubarb and custard was back up again and Mrs Tillotson went off in search of a bucket and mop.

  I can eat rhubarb and custard quite happily now. But the smell of school disinfectant can still make me break out into a cold sweat.

  Junior school, up Leeds Road, was even more trying, not least because of the robust lady who presided over the first form. Mrs Richardson could have taught Mussolini a thing or two about discipline and organisation. While I am sure that at home she was a kind and loving mother with a fondness for dogs and needlepoint, at school she could, under the right circumstances, become a spitting volcano of contumely.

  Dahn Leeds Road

  Almost as wide as she was high, Mrs Richardson had a mop of curly hair that quivered when she was angry. Under these circumstances, it was wise not to get too close, for two reasons. The first was her saliva, which could be projected a good six feet, and the second was her right index finger and thumb, which, when applied to the hairs at the back of your neck and twisted, could bring tears to the eyes of the toughest pupil.

  You could see these raging furies begin to build. First she would blink a lot, then she would raise her voice, and when the words ‘You big blockheads!’ tumbled out of her mouth, you knew that the twisted hair could not be far away.

  She’d be sacked now. But none of us would have wished that on her. We just wished she wouldn’t shout quite so loud when we were close by. And to be fair, it was Mrs Richardson who showed me how to get roots to grow on pussy willow (by doing nothing more than standing the stems in a jar of water), and to get broad-bean seeds to germinate on damp blotting paper up the sides of a large pickled-onion jar.

  The words ‘plumule’ and ‘radicle’ I learned at the tender age of eight.

  ‘What is the seed-coat for?’ asked Mrs Richardson.