Each door had its step, titivated up with ‘Donkey Stone’, this commodity being a slab of pale grey, dried china clay- type material which, when wet and applied like chalk, would leave a white finish. It was a bit like whitewash in block form. It was so called for the trademark, Donkey, in bas-relief. The idea was that white markings made the step easier to find, at night, in the days of inadequate or no street lighting, and the habit had been perpetuated by the house-proud, until it had become an art
form in microcosm. There were endless variations- some had a strip all the way round, some had a solid rectangle either side, others had triangular corners- some fashion of donkey stoning was de rigeur, on the steps of respectable people. Our step was minimal- a mere stone weather stop, hardly 3” back to front, and 2” high, but the ends had to be donkey stoned.
After John died, neighbours would stop me, in the street, to ask ‘Where’s your Daddy?’ to hear me reply ‘He’s gone on a puffa- train to fetch some Donkey Stone’. Then they would say ‘Oh, the lamb!’ and even wipe away a tear, sometimes, all of which I found confusing. I don’t know who taught me that piece of repartee, but I have forgiven them. I hope you will.
Standing in the middle of the yard, I can see up the top entry, where the extending ladder hangs, above the brick wall, darkly polished by the countless woollen coats and shawls, coarse overalls and skirts, cord trousers and cotton shirt sleeves, lurching up and down, until the bricks shone, if not like marble, then at least like polished wood. I used to think that the grimy brick walls, everywhere, were due to the fierce fires during the war. It took me quite a while to realise that the fires, which caused all the grime, were the countless natural coal fires, all over the city, silently poisoning the atmosphere with their sooty smoke, every day, and almost round the clock.
Leaving my flat at the top of Granville Road, early one morning, in the ‘60s, I looked down the long, straight hill and could only see half way. The valley seemed to be flooded with dirty water. It was the pollution, which had settled, in the calm air. This was in spite of the efforts of Roy Hattersley’s mother, Enid, who had spent all her working life on the City Council, championing the cause of clean air. She was instrumental in converting the whole city to smokeless fuel, and cleaner air, ward by ward, estate by estate, acre by acre, but even she couldn’t clean up the east end industries. Only their extinction would achieve that, in time.
The extending ladder hanging in the top passage, was in the custody of the air raid warden, one warden being appointed for so many houses. He was supposed to use it to rescue people from blazing buildings.
“What- on your own?”
“No, of course not! There’s me and Charlie Evans.. oh there’s a whole bunch of us! We’ve got a shed down on the allotment!”
No, that wasn’t air raid wardens, I know. It was Rob Wilton in the Home Guard, but where else are you going to get to hear it at this time of night?
The air raid warden was also given custody of a stirrup pump. This was an ingenious contraption. It was like a bicycle pump dangled in water, with an iron leg, ending in a flat plate- the stirrup- for the operator to stand on, thus steadying the whole contraption, leaving both hands free to work the pump, to deliver about a pint of water, 12 ft beyond the end of the pipe, at each stroke. The operating speed was a bit less than the pace of a bicycle pump, with a big, strong, burly feller on the job, that is. Even then, it was more suited to watering an allotment, than to putting out fires. A bucket full of wood shavings, carelessly ignited by a fag end, even blazing merrily, It could cope with, but a roof fire caused by an incendiary bomb was a bit ambitious. Fortunately, the general attitude was ambitious, or stoic, at least. The disease of cynicism was quite unknown.
So the warden took great pride in his ladder and his stirrup pump. Didn’t they prove that his friends and neighbours were relying on him? He asked the folk next to the passage to mind the ladder for him, and he asked someone with space under the sink to mind the stirrup pump. Everyone respected him for his public spiritedness, and they appreciated his diligence. So folk survived, largely because not surviving never entered their heads. The family who stabled the stirrup pump proudly painted the letters S.P. in white, over their door, and the folks living either side of the entries painted white rectangles on each side, to make the passages easier to find, in the blackouts. Someone touched up the old ‘V’ for victory signs from 1918, and when the time came, there were those who painted new ones, or even made them with wooden laths, and painted them red, white and blue. There were even some set with 15 watt lamps in batten holders, again, red, white and blue, all wired up through the nearest bed room window, and plugged into a light socket.
These yards were like separate villages, even though they were separated only by a brick wall, against one side of which was built the midden, and off the other side ran the double bank of WCs for the next yard. There were four yards along the street, ours being No.4 next to which the undertakers premises completed the block. I did know a couple of kids in the next yard, No.3, but beyond that, No.2 was like a foreign country. I don’t believe I ever went there. The house in each corner of a yard had the extra facility of an out-shot kitchen. The corner house next door but one to us wasn’t back to back with a house in the street, like the rest, but had a shop in the front, combined with the house behind it, in the yard. This was Mr. Froggat’s Grocery Shop. Think ‘Open All Hours’, minus the jokes, plus ration books. I was fascinated by the appearance of the packaging of things. Senior Service cigarettes in soft paper packets of a cream colour, with dark blue printing. I wasn’t familiar with the word ‘utility’ but I knew what it looked like. Cadbury’s chocolate went into a more modest livery for the austere war years. The outer wrapper was a deep blue colour, but not deep enough- a cheap looking version of Navy Blue- an unstable looking colour, and in fact, If one touched it with damp, sweaty, or greasy fingers, the fingerprints showed a purplish tinge, as though the ink had burned, or was blushing for shame of its poor quality.
When schools, nowadays, use that range of art paper known as ‘Sugar’ paper, I wonder how many know that it was first made, in its original colour of dark blue, to make bags for packing and selling sugar. It was next used, still in dark blue, to make 2” wide gummed tape for parcelling- sugar tape. I remember sugar tape with a particular fondness and gratitude.
For my 3rd or 4th Christmas, Father Christmas brought me a drum. It was the traditional, wooden rim construction, with real pig skin- well, it looked like pig skin, but on his way down the chimney, he accidentally put his foot through the skin. Fortunately, he knew that my Grandma kept a roll of sugar tape in the sideboard cupboard. Well, he knows everything, doesn’t he? So he was able to repair it before going back up the chimney.
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| Melody Makers |
The next year, he brought me a melodeon, which didn’t fare so well. One day, on asking to play with it, I was told I’d left it in the air-raid shelter. The cats had weed on it, and it smelled nasty, so had been thrown away. Many years later, I happened to tell the story of the melodeon to our children, one time when Betty was staying with us. At the end of the story, I happened to glance up at Betty, and she was almost wetting herself with suppressed laughter. It was only then, on seeing her face, that I realised it wasn’t true. I burst out, in feigned outrage-
“You lied to me! You only told me that because you didn’t want me to make a racket with it!” I couldn’t keep up my pretended affront, and soon we were all laughing at Betty’s 50yr old con trick.
Knowing where the air raid shelter was, and what space was available for it, I can say that it could have been no more than 20ft by 15ft, and a conjectural drawing shows me that the 24 households (23 in fact, discounting Froggat’s shop) for whom the shelter was provided, would each receive the benefit of one single bunk per household, with spare No.24 to toss up for. So it’s as well that our little yard community escaped blitz damage. This miracle of deliverance was in spite of the fact that the main shopping thoroughfare, the Moor, running parallel, and only two blocks south, suffered well over 50% destruction. In fact, those intervening two blocks didn’t have a lot left.
Most families chose to shelter in their cellars, oblivious of the fact that a bomb was most likely to penetrate through the roof, and right down to the cellar, before detonating. That is if the ground floor was a wooden construction. Ours was a stone flagged floor, laid over a brick-vaulted cellar, in which case, a bomb would have detonated on the stone flags, and slammed the brick vault down on top of us, if we had been there, that is, but we never were. On the rare occasions, after my birth, that we experienced an air raid warning, Jane felt safest in the alcove between the stairs door and the chimney breast, which left everyone else sitting round the table, in the middle of the house, where we could be just as sure as copping it as if we had stayed in bed and slept through it.
The nearest bomb fell on the yard across Milton Lane, immediately opposite the top passageway out of our yard. That was in the ’40 blitz, before I was born, so was already well established as a well levelled and clear site when I was first introduced to it by the Samuels brothers, under who’s tacit custody the site fell, them living in the next yard, i.e. the nearest miss to it. The nearest bomb, in my life, fell on the coal yard, round the corner, in Eldon Street. I don’t exactly remember it happening because I didn’t really know what had happened, but rather I remember the changes it made to the geography of the place. Being born in the war, I took the war to be the norm. I saw its effect, but I didn’t know this was a temporary sequence. Putting up the blackouts was normal. Buildings disappearing overnight was normal, not frequent, by the time I was taking notice, but not remarkable.
The coal yard was always there until, one day, it wasn’t. It had been remodelled to fit that euphemism, ‘waste ground’. You rarely see waste ground, now, never out here in the sticks, but in Sheffield, in the ‘40s, we’d cornered the market. We’d got loads. Nowadays it’s a big thing when a council provides a play area for a community. We had so many play areas, we couldn’t play on them all long enough, or hard enough to keep the weeds down
That’s something else. Even now, living in the countryside, I never see anything like the volume I saw then of Rose Bay Willow Herb, Budleah, Camomile, Dandelion, Golden Rod. We had play areas with rows of closets (not functioning- merely decorative) with Yorkshire ranges (some of those were still functioning) some were still festooned with wallpaper, and maybe even had a fireplace 20ft up the wall. Some were veritable treasure hoards of slate fragments- ideal for skimming on big puddles, or as markers for hopscotch. On the Moor, where a department store once stood, the open, basement area had been cleared of rubble and scrap, and had transformed itself into a huge lake, only 4 or 5” deep, where we kept frogs.
Some houses were left derelict, not having taken a direct hit, but just having taken a chimney stack through the roof, or spread of fire, or some other form of the bomb damage equivalent of ‘friendly fire’. One such house was next to the defunct coal yard. When my friend, Roger, and I, two inquisitive 5yr olds found it, although the door was boarded over, the window was mostly missing, so it was easy to scramble in, over the sill, to see what treasures we could find. The smell of damp plaster is with me still. What we found was terror.
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| House of Horror |
We hadn’t been standing there for more than a minute, when a youth of maybe 12yrs suddenly vaulted in, over the sill. Possibly, he had seen us laboriously scramble our way in. I remember him saying-
“What have we got, here?” I can’t remember anything else he said, and if I could, I wouldn’t be inclined to record it. We were subjected to a continuous out pouring of hate, obscenity, and threats of violence. He made us go before him, upstairs, right up to the attic, the roof of which was partly open to the elements. He didn’t lay a finger on either of us, at any time, but the torrent of hate, filth and violence never ceased. At some point, he dropped his trousers and had a crap, then wiped himself on a scrap of wallpaper. Then he scooped up some of the shit on a piece of slate, and pushed it towards our faces, threatening to make us eat it. Eventually, he let us go.
I believe he told us his name- Dennis Piers. He was a complete stranger to us, so I can’t imagine how I would come to know his name, if not from his own lips. Neither Roger nor I had uttered a sound, or shed a single tear. We were almost comatose with fear. We must have told our families what had happened, but I can’t imagine how.
I say we must have told them, because of the outcome, some days later. It was summer, with long, bright evenings. Roger and I were out in the street, when Dennis Piers came walking by. We cried out to the adults with us-
“That’s him!” What happened next isn’t clear, in my mind, but what seemed to happen is that Piers was immediately grabbed by adults, scooped up, and spirited away, and that’s all I recall. There was no court, no police, at least not that I am aware of. For all I know, they could have just hauled him out of sight, and kicked him to death. After all these years, I’m ashamed to say that it would be a matter of supreme indifference to me.
We always spoke of the blackouts (the screens as opposed to the events) in the plural, but in fact we only had the one window to black out. Charlie had made a light, wooden frame, which he had covered with black-dyed Hessian, or some such. It fitted under two pegs in the lintel, the bottom then secured by a wooden swivel. During the day, it lived with one or two others, in the corner between Froggats’ out-shot kitchen, and the closets. Because of the initial, chalky nature of the dye, and because the blackouts lived outdoors, the touch of the material felt like something dug up, in a cemetery. On the end wall of this little recess, was a cast iron sign, bearing the terse and enigmatic abjuration-
Commit no nuisance.
I don’t know when or how I learned that this was a genteel, Victorian warning, aimed at drunks wandering home, after dark, finding themselves well short of home, and suddenly being taken short, and meant, simply-
Don’t pee in this corner!
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