CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

[Stanley]

"those fluffy boleros" Isn't it funny what sticks in the memory! I have to admit that they never bothered me...

[Stanley]

How much better chips smelled and tasted when eaten out of newspaper when walking home on a frosty night......

[Stanley]

And were all fried in beef dripping!

[Stanley]

Exciting times in the 1950s when foreign foods started to be imported again, we saw fruits we had never seen before. But at the same time we lost things like fresh juicy liquorice root instead of the dry variety, Locust Kernels and dried Canadian apple rings, all things I really liked. My mother always said that dried apple rings made far better apple pies......

[Stanley]

There were some frightening sounds during the war, the air raid siren and the sound of planes going over. Later in the war there was the stuttering note of the V1. Then there were the explosions. We got used to them and never ignored them, they were too serious! Many years later I was walking with my friend Roger Paas through a town called New Ulm in Minnesota and he was telling me that the town had hosted German POWs during the war and had one of the biggest National Guard armouries of any small town in America. I said to him "I've got news for you. They have their own Luftwaffe as well, that plane you can hear is a Junkers bomber!". Once heard, never forgotten!

[Cathy]

Have we touched on the old Bank Pass Book's. A rep from a bank would come to your school and sign up the very young students with a Pass Book Savings Account. Whenever you deposited an amount the book would be stamped. They would also give you a money box that were shaped like pigs and called Piggy Banks.

[Stanley]

I can remember having a cast iron money box from Lloyd's Bank...... Can't remember the pass book though...

[Tizer]

I don't recall anyone coming to our school from the banks, Cathy - they knew it would be thin pickings, haha!

[Stanley]

One of my boyhood friends died yesterday. His grand daughter has found me on tinternetwebthingy and wants funny stories for her funeral oration. A practical use for childhood memories!

[Cathy]

Aww, just giving myself a pat on the back
Not really...

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

I sent her some pics going back to 1957 and some little snippets about Bill and me. They are my childhood as well so here they are.

"Bill and I both had Raleigh Clubman bikes and cycled all over Derbyshire at weekends. He had very smelly feet and I remember one very hot day we stopped to eat our butties at the side of a brook and Bill sat with his feet in it until they got numb with cold. He always said afterwards that it cured his smelly feet!
His first job when he left school was working on Stockport Parks Department and he learned about crown green bowling. He passed the knowledge on to me and we joined a bowling club on Heaton Moor, bought our own woods and played with all the old codgers. We were still very young and the oldsters were really pleased and taught us all the tricks of the trade. In the end we were beating them. A far cry from today's computer games!
We both went in the army at the same time, Bill in the Catering Corps and me in Anti-tank with the Cheshire regiment. I went abroad to Berlin but I think Bill stayed in the UK and we used to write to each other comparing note. One of the pics I will send is Bill at Sough where I was running the family grocer's shop in 1957. I think we both came out of our two years National Service in mid 1956 but of course I had then moved away. Later I had Hey Farm at Barnoldswick and Bill and the family visited us there and brought his mother who was no mean cricketer!
The house on Cliff Grove on Heaton Moor was a venue as well. We spent hours playing Bezique in front of a single element gas fire (my god it was cold!) and regularly went up into the attic on Saturdays because we could see the fireworks at Belle Vue from there and got a free show.
My dad had bought me an old half size billiard table and installed it in our front attic at Napier Road. It was very old and worn but we spent many hours up there playing snooker. I can't remember who was best, I suspect Bill because his eyes were better than mine.
We got up to mischief as well. I was of a scientific bent and disvoered that if you took a quart glass pop bottle, tied a brick to it so it would sink, put some carbide in (Used for making acetylene gas in cycle lamps) and some water, tightened the stopper down well and threw it in the deep water at the old brickworks near Hans Reynolds down at West Didsbury, after a while there was a very satisfactory explosion which killed innocent fish.
We were on the choir together at St Paul's on Heaton Moor and on one memorable occasion we led the choir out on strike for more money and better concessions. We put glue in all the locks on the building, climbed the tower and defied the Reverend Alfie Jeff and the choirmaster while throwing pigeon muck at them. I don't remember how that ended but I think we shocked them and never got any punishment, and more choir pay as well!
Many years afterwards Bill and I were comparing notes and found that we had been mildly sexually abused by the choirmaster. He used to get us to drop our trousers so he could look at our tackle. He said he was assessing how long it would be before our voices broke!"

[Tizer]

It would be interesting to know if the grand daughter includes the last paragraph in her funeral oration!

[Stanley]

Rachel said it shocked her a bit and asked me if Bill and I were upset. I told her no, we laughed when we talked about it years later. It took me 30 years to realise we had been abused. Bill laughed himself silly because he got there years before me. We were totally innocent and believed our elders. I often think of that when people are relating their experiences and they are asked why they never said anything.....
I hope she does use it......

[plaques]

One of our religious instructor teachers, does this sound familiar? when on football duty would try to walk alongside you and pat you on the bottom as a sign of encouragement. Needless to say the distance from the changing rooms to the pitches were always carried out at the double before he emerged from the staff room.

[plaques]

Continuing with the above theme. This particular RI teacher soon got his P45. He was temporally replaced by higher authority by a real life clergy called believe it or not Cannon Ball.

[Stanley]

Our choirmaster departed for pastures new and with hindsight I often wonder if he had been sussed..... We got a bloke called Geoff Barber who was great and we were all a lot happier.

[Marilyn]

I recalled a very vivid memory the other day about being shown the correct way to empty a carpet sweeper. I was only a child..possibly 7 or 8 years of age. I had to put a couple of sheets of dry newspaper down, with a damp layer of newspaper on top. Empty the cassettes onto the damp newspaper and wrap it up like fish and chips. The whole lot went in the fire. The damp newspaper was to stop the dust spreading.
I used to get ever so excited when the dust would plop out of the cassettes in a thick wad. Not so exciting when it was just a few stray crumbs.
Why this ancient memory popped into my brain, I shall never know. Haven't owned a carpet sweeper as an adult...but they were quite good contraptions. I believe they are still made.

[Stanley]

It was the Ewbank here Maz and I remember using it for my mother.

[Tizer]

We bought a new one a few months ago. The new Dyson vacuum is very noisy and hard to push about on our carpets so we use the sweeper more often and just occasionally the Dyson (which also seems to remove a lot of the carpet but still leaves bits on the surface).

[Cathy]

I can remember being taught how to iron simple things when I was about 10 yrs old.

[Stanley]

Looking back triggered by these memories I realise that my mother was very good at passing skills on. I 'helped' with the ironing and wash day as well and at one time she even taught me simple knitting. I never progressed beyond 'knit one purl one'.

[Cathy]

Penny Dreadful. I've been told they were a book of about A5 size full of crime stories (that never actually happened), and were very popular with our grandmothers, maybe even our mothers.
Today they are in the form of a cheap magazine and include a lot of puzzles.

[Stanley]

'True Crime' magazines were very popular in the 19th century Cathy and the generic term for them was Penny Dreadfuls. As well as murder they gave extensive coverage of the court reports which were made public. In 1888 the 'Jack the Ripper' murders in East London triggered even more activity in this genre.

[Cathy]

Oh so the crimes were true then.

I don't imagine that the ones in the newer cheap mags are tho, story's like My mum tried to drown me when I was a month old. Just rubbish , but guess what, the people get paid for their story's.