When at school, Julia had the usual rudimentary health checks, and everything seemed fine. Then one time she was having an eye test, and a different nurse was in charge. The nurse held a card over each eye, in turn, and asked Julia to read the letters on the chart. The first eye was fine, but when the nurse switched the card to the other eye, Julia had nothing to say. Jane, who had accompanied her, tried to encourage her-
“Come on Julia. Shout up! You’ve done it before”.
“I can’t see anything, Mam”.
“Yes you can. You seen ‘em before. Shout up!”
“I didn’t, Mam”.
“Well how did you know what the letters were?”
“Before, the other nurse let me ‘old the card”, the child explained, timidly, “and I moved it, so I could see the letters with the other eye, the good one”.
Whether anything could have been done if it had been found earlier is not to know, and poor Julia lived her whole life with virtually one eye. It’s a shame that a lot of parents and teachers still don’t realise that where we adults only recognise the alternatives of true and untrue, children have a third option which, to them, seems of a greater acceptability than either of the other two. Their more palatable response to any query is ‘tell the adults what they want to hear’. The truth doesn’t always suit; lies are no more reliable, but telling the grown-ups what they want to hear is always well received.
With Albert born in 1910, Joseph in 1912, and Dorothy in 1914, Julia, not unusually for the times, became second in command, Jane’s first reserve, as it were. Perhaps this is why poor Julia remained a bossy boots all her life. She was 13yrs old when the 3rd daughter, Elizabeth my mother, was born, and Julia was soon given the job of nurse and minder to the baby, to the extent of taking it to school with her. Any feeding and changing necessary had to be done in school, even though it was literally across the street from home. Amazingly, this was common practice, at the time.
On one occasion, despite Charlie dozing through his newspaper, in his fireside armchair, Julia was left in charge while Jane went shopping. On her return, she was horrified to find young Albert (pre-school age) sporting a knife and fork haircut. Julia had decided to give him a haircut, and he looked as though she had used a mincer. When Jane castigated Charlie for allowing it to happen, he denied all knowledge, but when pressed, he confessed to being aware of a continuous clicking noise, and of Julia repeatedly muttering ‘he likes it, he likes it’
It is through Julia that we have our last encounter with her paternal grandfather, John. Interestingly, in repeating this tale as she did several times over the years, she never once referred to him as her grandfather or grand-dad, but always he was ‘old John Eckhardt’ as though wanting to negate all ties with him. She recalled the occasions when he would roll up at Hodgson Street, seeking a bed for the night, which was the sofa in front of the Yorkshire range. Always drunk, always in his huge leather apron which he slept under, fully dressed, and always insisting he be allowed to cook his own supper. This was ‘Skilly’ a German peasant dish- basically flour cooked in water, with the added culinary refinement of onions boiled in milk, the whole combining into a thick, hot gruel, liberally seasoned with salt and pepper. Julia’s complaint was that she always had to clean up the mess, next morning, by which time, apart from smelling obnoxious, the dried remains had turned the saucepans green, needing much scouring to make them clean again.
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| He likes it! |
“I’m just nippin’ next door to see Mrs. Wilde. I shan’t be a minute” and out she trotted, knowing that Albert would oblige her, so long as he wasn’t actually seen to do it. Unfortunately, Jane wasn’t smart enough. She came back just seconds too soon. He had the shovel of coal half way from the cellar door to the fire, when she came in. He just dropped the shovel and the coal on the pegged rug at his feet, and shot out, leaving Jane to clean up the mess and mend the fire.
A popular children’s game was to stand in the yard and throw a ball over the roof, into the street, where someone else would throw it back, and so on. Sometimes it happened that a short throw left the ball stuck in the gutter, at the eaves, three storeys up. What to do? Fetch Albert Eckhardt. He’s the only kid brave enough and daft enough to climb up the drainpipe and rescue the ball. He never refuses, if you dare him. On one such occasion, he fell from the drainpipe and broke his leg. Knowing what his injury was, he simply picked himself up and hobbled off to the Casualty Dept. of the Royal Hospital, about half a mile away. A couple of kids did think to go and yell through Jane’s open door-
“Your Albert’s fell off ‘slates an’ brock ‘is leg!”
“He orter ‘ave broke ‘is flamin’ neck!” was the sum total of Jane’s concern.
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| “E’s brock ‘is leg!” |
Just beyond where the entry fed out between us, and the Wildes’, into the street, a short stretch of road was surfaced with oak blocks, set on end grain, in tar. As it extended only to the end of the undertakers’ frontage, I thought there must be some connection with horses’ hooves, until I learned that before the undertakers, the site was occupied by a pub- the Foresters’ Arms, and the wood blocks were already there. I know of no other occurrence of this surface treatment. However, the occasional gap between blocks was jolly useful for playing marbles. Such holes invariably contained a little rainwater, so when a marble was knocked in, it went in with a little plop and came out very clean.
More importantly, in hot weather, the pitch would melt and bubble up between the blocks, forming shiny black pearls of varying sizes. Generations of kids, mine included, couldn’t resist picking at, and pulling up the intriguing soft, inky beads of viscous tar, and watching the resultant umbilical cord stretch thinner and thinner, finer than the lightest cobwebs, almost too thin to see because by this time it was long, too, because you were now holding the bead as high as possible, away from its source, and only then would it break, pause and float in the air, before swooping, gliding, spiralling down to leave an almost invisible trail of tar across shoes, socks, shins, trousers, shirt, jumper, face, hair- one long thin line embracing so much- one long thin line of irremovable pitch. The only known, successful removing agent was butter, and such butter as was about was usually earmarked for a more positive destiny.
One Whitsuntide, as was then customary and even through my childhood, Albert was provided with a new outfit of clothes which comprised a pale grey suit of jacket and short trousers, and new shoes and socks. It was a Whitsuntide custom for children newly clad so, to then show off their new clothes to anyone they could find, in the hope of being given a coin or two. Only the hardest heart could resist being held to ransom in this way by any child who accosted him or her, relative, friend, or even stranger, with-
“Do yer like me whitsun cloze?”
When Albert was thus equipped, scrubbed and polished, and about to go out and levy tolls on the world, his father said, rather foolishly-
“Now go and fill them pockets wi’ pitch”. Within half an hour, the lad burst back into the house, yelling triumphantly-
“I’ve done it, Dad!” and he had. Every pocket of his new suit was full of soft, shiny, sticky, irremovable tar.
When our son was a boy, any occasional wobbler on his part was always classified as a ‘touch of the Uncle Alberts’.
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The woodblocks set in tar are the closest link I’m going to get to something that has puzzled me for over 60 yrs. It concerns not the road surface, but the adjacent pavement. I told you it was close, and there is tar involved. In my infancy, the city pavements were indeed paved with large slabs of York stone. This fine-grained sandstone came in various hues of honey, cream, pink, mauve, a hundred shades within a blink of buff. The slabs were in random sizes from 2ft square, to 5ft square.
Now here comes the puzzle. Maybe twice a year, a man would appear from the Public Works Dept., instantly recognisable by his black gabardine mackintosh, and his peaked and badged cap, which were worn to protect him from the heat of the summer sun, and from anonymity. He would prowl along the pavement with what looked like an oil can in one hand, and a hammer and a long steel spike in the other. Every 20 yds or so he would stop and drive the steel spike down in one of the cracks between two paving slabs, by means of a few, sharp, manful blows of the hammer. He would drive the spike in hardly much more than the 2” of the slabs’ thickness, the extra length of spike being to obviate his having to bend over too far. He would then with draw the spike, and squint down the hole. Finally, he would pick up his ‘oil’ can, about a quart in capacity, and pour maybe a tablespoonful of what, in fact, proved to be cold tar, or similar, into the hole, taking great care to see that the whole dose went cleanly down the hole. Then off he would trot, and repeat the whole process, at regular intervals, until he passed from sight.
We haven’t finished yet. After an interval of 5 or 10 minutes, one of his little friends would come along, easily recognisable by the same ceremonial robes. This gent carried with him only a bag of fine sand, say half a stone in weight. He would stop at each hole. He too would squint down it, then he would pour a handful of sand into the hole. Presumably this was done to prevent the likes of me from getting tar under our shoes. Although the first process took longer than the second, the interval between the two was maintained, as far as I could judge.
Now what was it all in aid of? I’m buggered if I know. Answers on a post card?