Chapter
2
Early
Years
My father became very ill in late 1941 and into 1942 suffering from a
duodenal ulcer, he had a major operation in
Aunt Alice’s pep talk had the desired effect; he made a full recovery
and lived another 23 years.
I’m told that at 1 year old I had very long blonde hair, my sisters
used to cut it and screw my eyebrows at the ends and call me the little devil
.Alice and Olive used to push me around in an old battered pram and I’m told
one day decided to let me and the pram go down Henderson Avenue to see what
would happen, luckily for me it ran down the foot path and rammed into a gate
post and stopped, I hadn’t yet passed my driving test so it’s just as well they
didn’t send me down the road.
At 2 years I pulled a full boiling hot tea pot off the table over my
head and I can remember being very poorly and lay around on the settee for days
and being visited by the district nurse. I was lucky that the water had just
gone off the boil but the scalding took several weeks to heal.
At the outset of the war, air raid shelters had been built in the
streets which restricted movement of traffic which was mainly horse and cart
traders with an occasional motor vehicle and I can remember some of the traders
in the early to late 40’s
Milk being
delivered to the door by horse drawn cart and being ladled from a churn into a
jug by the co-op dairyman, who after the war began delivering milk in
bottles exchanged for milk tokens which were left on
the door step with the empty bottles, the milk tokens were bought from the
co-op at the same time as the order was placed for other essentials which were
delivered to the door.
Dickie Dido (Richard Thompson) a well known character in
the village used to sell fresh herring which he sold by the scoop. Mother used
to gut, cut and roll them and cook them in the coal fired oven until they were
golden brown. They were lovely, they’re rarely eaten nowadays.
The Co-op
store butcher was a big jolly red faced man who mother used to say always
looked well oiled driving his horse drawn meat cart on Friday afternoons, being
stalked by our mongrel dog
The paraffin oil and firewood cart owned by Mr Shutt
who lived down in the keyhole (cul-de- sac) in Jack
Lawson Terrace came around once a fortnight; paraffin oil was sold by the pint,
using a measuring beaker, mother used it in her oil lamp [Kelly Lamp] to go to
bed with, to see the alarm clock. And she often said it was a comfort at night
and had been using one since she was a child. In her later years when she was
about 80 her eyesight began to fail, so the Kelly lamp had to go.
Dickie Dido when he wasn’t selling fish would come
around collecting rags, woollens or scrap in exchange for white wash or
balloons. [The pantry was white washed regularly] I don’t recall having many
balloons.
As kids when we were hungry between meals we used to go into the
pantry and cut a slice of bread and spread margarine on it and top it off with
jam or sugar.
People moved house using horse and cart. Their belongings tied on
precariously with rope. Insurance? I don’t think so
Lots of other sellers came around and it was the norm to run out and
shovel up the horse manure left behind for use on the gardens, which now when I
look back I cant think why, because there weren’t many tidy gardens in those
days.
Nearly every-one in the village was a member of the Sherburn Hill Co-op society which sold almost everything
under one roof, all your needs from the cradle to the grave. Super stores are
not a new idea but you had to queue for everything. The co-op had a Lamson Tube vacuum system in operation, men pushing
trolleys, who would have thought that would happen in the future, I’m one of
the men who go regularly to the super markets and shops with their wives and
push the trolleys.
Families had the benefit of short term credit facilities and a much
welcomed store dividend, paid out on a Quarterly basis our credit reference
number was 7660. We also shopped at the Meadow Dairy which was in the front
street. Hannah Robson had a small shop in the front room of her house in the
front street. People who took advantage of her and got credit from her and then
conveniently forgot to pay her back used to have their names displayed in the
shop window. I’m delighted to know that we didn’t fall into that category.
I spent a lot of my time in my early years playing outside in the
garden or in the large field behind the houses which was a playground for all
the kids on the block in Wheatley Terrace, close bonding and friendships were
made there. The field as it was known to everyone in the terrace became my
furthest travel apart from going to the shops with mother until I went to
school in1945.
I shared a bedroom with brothers Winston and Frank and on the wall of
the bedroom was a large coloured portrait photograph of Joseph Kell my mothers brother who was
killed in the first World War. His blue eyes always seemed to follow you around
the room, but that can be said about any large portrait photograph hanging on a
wall. As my father always said it’s not the dead that’ll harm you it’s the
living that will.
We also had a
large oval shaped framed coloured portrait photograph of my grandmother in the
living room and when my father died in 1964 his younger brother Edward asked my
mother if he could have it and she gave it to him. I’ve since been given a copy
of the photo from my cousin Edward who inherited it from his father. For some
unknown reason that portrait fell off the wall making a loud bang in the middle
of the night. My mother shouted who’s there as my father went to investigate
and found the picture on the floor undamaged. Shortly after there was a knock
on the front door and aunt
James Worthington who was my father’s younger brother was killed at
the Battle of Venray in