A Testament, Part One

I wrote this piece two or three years ago; it is reposted from my old blog.

I was born in the city of Leicester, in the English Midlands, on a street exactly like Coronation Street, cobblestones and all. My family was solidly working class or artisan; my grandfather on my mother’s side was a skilled mechanic and general fix-it man, and on my father’s side my grandfather was a watchmaker. My paternal grandfather had served as an infantryman throughout the entire four years of the First World War; he was gassed in the trenches, and although he survived, his lungs bore the damage for the rest of his life. He died when I was very young.

My Dad, who was the middle child in a family of five siblings, left school when he was sixteen and became a commercial artist, painting and drawing in the advertising department of a local ‘sock and stocking’ company. He met my Mum in the youth group of St. Barnabas’ Anglican Church in Leicester; in those days church youth groups were social groups as much as anything else, and Mum and Dad talk about going dancing there on Saturday nights and taking part in other social activities. Mum was a lot younger than Dad when they got married; she had been a telephonist, but after I was born she spent her time at home as a full-time, stay-at-home Mum. The only time during my childhood and youth when that changed was when my Dad was away at theological college, when she worked to support us.

We lived on Woodland Road in Leicester (a misnomer; there was no woodland in sight!) in a street of industrial revolution row-housing – all the houses joined together, with little passageways at ground floor level leading to the tiny back gardens. Downstairs was a front room that we never used except after funerals and the odd special occasion, a back room which served as living room and dining room, and a kitchen built onto the back. The ‘bathroom’ (or ‘toilet’ as we called it in the less fastidious British dialect!) was joined to the house at the back, but you couldn’t actually access it from the house; you had to go outside. And it wasn’t heated; there was no reading on the loo in my childhood, I can assure you! Upstairs were the bedrooms. Coal fires, and no central heating.

My Mum and Dad and my brother and I lived on one side of Woodland Road, and my maternal grandparents, or ‘Nana and Grandpa’ as we called them, lived on the other. Thus it was inevitable that we would grow up very close to our maternal grandparents. Later on, when my Dad was off at theological college and my Mum was at work, my Nana babysat my brother and I. They had a TV (or a ‘telly’ as it was called in Midlands-speak) long before we had one, and it was on their telly that I watched ‘Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men’, ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Stingray’, and ‘Thunderbirds’ – the glory days of Gerry Anderson’s marionette shows!

My grandfather was short and bald and smoked a pipe, and although he talked tough we all knew he had a soft heart. For some reason when he wanted to communicate endearment he would call you ‘cough drop’ (well – that’s what he said to my brother and me anyway!); Nana’s equivalent term was ‘ducks’ or ‘ducky’ or ‘me duck’ (which was fairly common in Midlands-speak, and for all I know still is). Grandpa worked for Sturgess’ garage in Leicester, and toward the end of his time there one of his jobs was to drive Land Rovers all over the place to be delivered to customers. Not a bad job, I’ve often thought. He could fix anything and make things out of anything; in later years he made my kids an old railway engine out of pop cans and other leftover scrap, painting it up so well that you’d never have guessed where the parts came from. He made scooters for my brother and I when we were little; small wheeled contraptions which you stood on with one foot and propelled by pushing against the road with the other.

When my brother and I were little my Mum’s younger sister, Auntie Carole, was courting Alan Hewitt, and we thought it was a great day when she married him. Alan had a motorbike and looked like James Dean; we thought he was the coolest person we knew. He worked in his Dad’s ladder business, and it was hard work, too; six and sometimes seven days a week, long hours, making and delivering ladders all over Leicester. Auntie Carole was much younger than my Mum, and she and Alan often babysat for my brother and me when we were little. In 1963 she did something very subversive; she introduced us to the music of the Beatles (‘pop’ music was not played in my house, or my Nana and Grandpa’s house, either!).

Very few people had cars in those days; working class folks got around by bicycle or bus, or took the train. But I do remember us somehow (did my Grandpa have a car, or did we take the train?) making regular visits to Bradgate Park, on the northwest side of Leicester. This old country park had once been the home of Lady Jane Gray’s family, and it was a great place to walk and run. There was (and still is) a hill there called Old John with a battlemented tower on top of it; we used to love climbing that hill and looking out at the City of Leicester spread below us. There were deer all over Bradgate Park, and still are to this day. Nearby at Swithland Woods, a relative of ours had a bungalow (what nowadays in Canada would be called a ‘holiday cottage’, I suppose, though this truly was small and rustic); I have vague memories of summer visits out there, and cricket games in the field in front of the bungalows.

My paternal grandfather died when I was very young and I have no memories of him at all. My Grandma (or ‘Gromma’ as we boys said in our Leicester dialect) lived outside the city at Barrow-on-Soar with my Dad’s oldest brother, Uncle John, and his son David. Some Saturdays we rode the train out there to visit them; David was the only cousin I saw a lot of when I was young. I remember that the back garden of their house was right up against the railway tracks, and when we went home on the train we would wave to ‘Gromma’, Uncle John, and David as they stood by the brick wall at the back of the property. If I remember correctly it was a six mile trip by train; that was an adventure.

Today’s children can have little idea of what our life was like then, growing up in a working class neighbourhood in the city in the early 1960’s. There were no computers, no cell phones, no video games, no DVDs or videos. A Saturday outing to ‘the pictures’ (movies) was a luxury; I well remember how excited we were when Auntie Carole took us to see ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’, and later on we saw ‘The Sound of Music’ on the big screen too. ‘Sweets’, as we called candies, were something to be saved and savoured, as we didn’t get them often. We played outside a lot of the time, my brother and I, making our own fun. If we wanted to watch TV we went across the road to Nana and Grandpa’s house.

We must have often been cold, but we took it for granted, I suppose, and wore lots of clothes, especially woolen sweaters, which my mother would knit. My Dad would get up in the morning, start a fire in the fireplace in the living room, and then as the kindling burned he would gradually load it with coal. He would then cover the fireplace with a sheet of newspaper for a minute to draw the fire up the chimney; by the time we were down, there would be a cheery fire in the grate. Warmth really did depend on where in a room you sat; close by the fire was toasty hot, but back in the far corners the rooms got very cold and damp.

One time of year I remember very well was ‘Guy Fawkes’ or ‘Bonfire Night’. On November 5^th, for some reason, the Brits remember the man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the seventeenth century; when I was a child the night was celebrated with the building of bonfires, the burning of ‘Guys’ (stuffed effigies of Guy Fawkes), and the letting off of the most wonderful fireworks. I never thought anything of the history behind the day; all I knew was that we were going to see rockets and Catherine wheels, and hold sparklers in our hands and weave patterns of light with them until they fizzled out.

Another autumn game was ‘conkers’, or chestnuts. The chestnut trees were full and we children would collect the ‘conkers,’ as we called them. We would drill a hole through each chestnut, hang it on a string, and then compete with our friends, bashing conkers together until one broke the other. A ‘sixer’ was a conker which had defeated six others; if your ‘two-er’ defeated someone else’s ‘sixer’, yours immediately became an ‘eight-er’! One way of learning basic arithmetic, I suppose!

Once a year my Dad would get a week’s holiday, and we would take a long journey by train all the way to Bournemouth on the south coast of England. Every year we stayed in the same hotel, the ‘Saxonhurst’. Bournemouth had high cliffs, and there was a steep zig-zag path down to the beach. You only wanted to walk that path once during the day, so we went down in the morning with all we would need for the day in bags. If it was windy (as it often was), we would put up canvas windbreaks to provide shelter for our deck chairs. My Dad and my brother and I would swim (the Atlantic Ocean was cold, I can tell you!), jump waves, and spend hours making sandcastles and digging trenches and constructing elaborate fortifications in the sand. Or we would take turns burying each other up to our necks and then breaking out! Once or twice during the holiday we might go to the pier, a long platform protruding out over the sea, with all sorts of different entertainments on it; what I remember the best is the times when my parents would buy us sticks of ‘rock’: hard, sweet candy cut in sticks a foot long, wrapped in plastic with a photo of the pier on the wrapper. A stick of rock would last you days and days; at least, my parents made sure that it did!

When I think of us boys now, both of us in our short trousers and wool sweaters, playing conkers, going out in the cold to use the outside loo, making models with the sawed-off ends of the rungs from Uncle Alan’s ladders (‘knobs’, as we called them), those days seem so far removed from the life that children live today. We were poor, I suppose, but so was everyone else we knew, and we didn’t know any different. And Woodland Road in those days was a real community. My Uncle Alan tells me (I don’t remember it myself) that on warm summer evenings people would bring their chairs out and sit on the sidewalks in front of their houses (which opened right out onto the street, with no front gardens); some houses would send a member down to the corner with a jug for some beer from the off-license, and neighbours would walk up and down the street all evening visiting with each other.

That area of Leicester is now over ninety percent inhabited by immigrants from Asian countries, and they have replaced that old English culture with a rich and vibrant way of life of their own. The Woodland Road life that I knew has gone for good, and indeed my memories of it are very vague. But for what I remember, I’m thankful, and I’m very glad I grew up when I did, before technology changed the life of children forever. It was a simple life, and no doubt I romanticize it a little, but I think it was a good life, and I’m grateful for it.