Man and Boy.When I look back on my youth I see endless days playing football, or being down the river, working on the farm, or just mucking around up the gully by the pond. But of course those times just roll into an indeterminable fuzz of events. In reality I expect things happened in phases and were dependant on the weather, the availability of mates and school holidays. Football was very important and it only needed one mate to make up a game. I was very lucky because our cottage had one gable end actually forming the roadside. This wall had one small window just below the chimney, in the roof space. A great place to play. The ball could be kicked in all manner of ways to hone your skills, such as… One-touch passing back and forth a hundred times. Goalkeeper kicks out. Goalkeeper catches or punches. Heading tennis. Penalties. Later on when I was keen on proper tennis, that wall was my best practice partner. Sometimes mum would put a stop to the game. I expect the thud - thud - thud became a bit nerve wracking; even for a placid person like her.
The road, or track, to Yew Tree farm ran for about 30 yards from the end of the gable, down the left side of our house. It was tarmac and there was a wide grass verge up to our fence. Down the other side ran Mr. Robinson’s cow sheds. Single story stone built and centuries old, all topped with a pitched slate roof and containing no windows. Another practice area for me! This one was good because nobody minded the noise and if you skilfully angled the footballs rebound you could make diving saves, or spectacular diving headers.
Our house we had three floors. The ground floor consisted of a kitchen extension, the living room, where we lived and ate; and the front room, or parlour, which was only used on Sundays - until the telly moved in there.
We never had a telly until I was a teenager. Up till then I had to watch such events as the Cup Final on Mr. Johnson’s set. Mr. Johnson and his wife lived over the road and were an elderly couple. I remember one Cup Final in particular… not for the teams playing, or the result, but for an extraordinary drink Mr. Johnson made me. It was a cold day and we were huddled by his fire watching the hour-long build-up to the game. Abide with me and all that.
‘Y’cold Alun?’
‘I’m alrite Mr. Johnson’
I was a very unassuming boy and didn’t want to be a nuisance. I expect that’s how I was taught to be when I went off to people’s houses. I was always ‘alrite, even if I wasn’t. I was never thirsty when offered a drink, or hungry when offered food.
‘I’ll get’yu somethin’ speshul y’just wait there’ said Mr. Johnson.
He was gone for a while and in the background I could hear the kettle boil. A cup of chocolate, tea or maybe coffee? I hoped it wasn’t Camp coffee. It wasn’t. It was worse. First it was in a glass. Hot vapours were rising from a glass! Something I’d never seen before. As he got carefully nearer I could smell peppermint… a nice smell.
‘Eer’yar boy. Sip that, but mind its ot’
It smelled wonderful. The rising vapour with its spearmint aroma promised bliss. The warmth of the glass was like holding a sunbeam… everything boded well. Then I had a sip. Just the one was enough. How I managed to not be sick. Not to cough. Not to grimace. I’ve never know to this day if it was a wind-up, or some kind of Johnson manhood ritual.
Back to the estate agents tour. The kitchen was not as a 21st century person would picture. No Mfi here. The walls were raw brick and stone, painted with a shiny washable paint. There was a Belfast sink with a wooden draining board. A ‘copper’ which was a tub heated by gas to boil water. It was about the size of a tumble dryer but cylindrical. The boiling water was usual used to place washing in. After boiling, it would be wrung out with a hand-cranked wringer that was clamped to the draining board. The steaming wrung washing would drop into the sink, which was filled with cold water for rinsing. Mum would rinse the clothes by hand; wringing them as dry as possible before hanging them out to dry. So let’s just go over that again girls. First the washing was boiled in a tub with washing powder added; DAZ or OMO. Secondly, using a pair of wooden sprung tongues, the washing was lifted out of the boiling water onto the draining board. Mum would pick up the item and feed it, with one hand, into the wringer whilst cranking it through with the other hand. The boiled washing could scold your hands. Third. Her hot hands were then plunged into the ice-cold water to rinse the washing out. This procedure was repeated for each item of clothing and washing would take all day.
The cooker was a gas stove of which I have no interesting facts to convey.
The copper also heated the water for a bath. Oh how I dreaded Friday night. Mum went off to a Whist Drive most Friday nights. It was her one night off. Dad was left to supervise my bath. Thinking back I don’t know why he had to supervise my bath. Where were my brother and sister; didn’t they need baths for some genetic wonderment that I had missed, or did they never get dirty?
Anyway, dad would sit in the living room either listening to the wireless or later watching the telly. First the tin bath was dragged into the kitchen; from the lean-to by the side of the kitchen. It would settle in the middle of the kitchen. Mum would have set the copper going so the water would get hot and ready. Dad would come and check the copper was properly turned off and then help me to empty the hot water into the bath via buckets and the tap at the base of the copper. 80% of the hot was placed in. Then cold from the tap was added until I was happy with the temperature of the water in the bath. The last 20% was for use if too much cold had been added, or if someone else was having a bath after me and would need the water topping-up. With the water in place dad would retire back to the wireless. I was allowed to lock the back door and draw the curtains. The door between the kitchen and the living room did have a shut bolt but shutting it was thought to be ‘un-necessary’. We didn’t have central heating; in fact all we had was a coal fire in the living room and in the front room. The kitchen could be chilly and you relied on the residual heat from the copper and the hot bath for warmth. Not that I ever had any intention of getting into it. Usually I stripped off to vest and pants so that I was ready to take the plunge if dad made a move to inspect. I took the opportunity to scrape my knees; they were usually caked in a weeks mud from football. Having scratched the mud off, they would be washed with a flannel. Nothing else got muddy so I couldn’t see any reason to wash clean bits. It was necessary to splash the water and bang the tin bath like as if I was really in it. Oh yes and to scum up the water with soap. Other than that I could read a comic.
‘Bowt time y’got owt boy’ Dad would say, if he hadn’t fallen asleep.
‘J’st anuther minut dad’
Remembering to make the towel wet and dampen my hair, I’d get dressed.
‘Giv’us a hand with the barth dad, wil’yu’
Dad and I would carefully drag the bath out the back door and he would tip the water out, content that the water was a dirty scum colour as the result of a serious bathing. I wonder what mums take was on events. She would have known I never washed properly. She must have known about BO even if I didn’t. The hall where the whist drives took place would be booked for the W.I., or some other organization, every third Fridays in the month. No whist drive meant a proper bath. There was no faking it with mum about.
On a different note there was one annual event that was neither warm nor clean.
Springtime meant the farmers had ploughed the field and prepared the seed-beds. I never did more than 1 days ploughing in my life. Not because I wasn’t any good at it. It was a job for a man and normally done by John of his full timer. Following with the discs, or the harrows, or the roller, was OK for a teenager and I spent many a happy day on the second tractor harrowing. I loved it. Back and forward. Up and down. Round and round. John was probably happy to have me do this as it inevitably led to drilling. Drilling was serious stuff. You could disc over bad discing and harrow over bad harrowing but drilling had to be done properly… first time otherwise the profitability of the crop was compromised. One blocked drill head and that meant 200 yards x 6 inches without a crop.
The drill was a modern combination drill. This meant that the seed was in a crossways hopper and a parallel hopper held the fertilizer that was basically nitrogen pellets. Each hopper had two half width hinged covers; to keep everything dry. The large steel land wheels of the drill turned two sets of gears – one below each hopper; these were calibrated with some gubbin’s to mix the correct quantity of seed with the correct amount of fertilizer. This mixture was riddled down a series of flexible tubes and between to two discs that formed a forward facing vee shape. The discs were pressed into the soil so that the seed mixture fell into a nice little slot. Opposing fingers followed to close the slot and bury the seed mixture. Each slot was about six inches apart and the whole drill was about ten foot wide. There were two jobs. Job one was to drive the tractor in a straight beat and in-line with the previous beat; you mustn’t have a gap as that meant no crop. At each headland a rope from the drill to the tractor needed pulling to stop the gears driving the gubbin’s and so prevent wasted seeding whilst turning. The next job was to man the drill. A foot board ran across the back of the drill; the drill man stood on this plank and was able to move from left to right lifting the covers to check the levels. Sometimes the seed to fertilizer mix meant that they ran out at different times. The next job for the drill man was to squat on his haunches, holding a handrail that ran across the back. He would check that the seed mixture was dropping into the slot in the ground. A blocked chute needed clearing quickly; otherwise it was necessary to stop the tractor to clear it. Clearing on-the-move was done with a prodder. A prodder was usually a thin metal rod bent into a shape evolved by experience. It needed to be ok for smacking as well as prodding; importantly, you dropped it at your peril. That enforced a tractor stop. The flexible tubes were made of a combination of corrugated rubber tubing and tin joiners. A bit like old fashioned knights armour, with rubber instead of chain-mail. Remember all this had to happen with the drill moving over the bumpy land on un-sprung steel wheels. Add to that a touch of frost, or freezing wind, rattelin’ gubbin’s and you can imagine how hard this job was. It went on hour after hour. The only respite was the five minutes it took to re-load seed and nitrogen. Gloves were a no no. Impossible to hold-on wearing gloves whilst riddling the seeds and nitrogen at the same time. Hour after hour you needed to keep your concentration or the results of your in-attention would become apparent a few weeks later when the green shoots appeared; or in this case didn’t. In fact all these aspects of the job paled into comparison with checking the nitrogen hopper. Nitrogen pellets were very susceptible to damp. A little dampness caused the pellets to crust. You opened the hopper and it looked full but you couldn’t trust it. You needed to comb your fingers through it and break it up.
So we have freezing cold hand, hanging on to a cold steel bar to stop you from slipping off a foot board in your muddy wellies. Can it get worse; Oh yes. It could for me. In his wisdom God chose that I would be a nail biter. I was a happy lad without a care in the world. Well fed. Well loved. No need to nibble the quick’s, but I did. My fingertips would sometime be raw. Two things don’t go well together; nitrogen and raw flesh.
A days drilling was more a job for a man than a boy. I don’t know how much a man would earn a day. I got a shilling.
