He bought me a football, and a pair of football boots. A football, in the ‘40s, wasn’t one of these plasticised toys that even the professionals use today. It was made of strips of leather sewn together into a spherical case (hence the name ‘case ball’ or in the vernacular ‘casey’) which had a rubber bladder inside. The bladder was inflated by a bicycle pump, or by a mouth. The rubber neck was then folded over and bound by a thick rubber band. Thus sealed, the neck was pushed back inside the access slit, which was then laced up, like a shoe, with a leather thong, the end of which was finally worked back inside, under its own tightened loops. If this final operation didn’t leave you with broken and bloody nails, then it meant you hadn’t put enough wind into the bladder to start with.
The boots were made wholly of leather, very heavy, stiff leather, which would need soaking in Dubbin, a waterproofing, softening agent, specific to this purpose, repeatedly over a matter of weeks if not months, before they became anything approaching bendable, much less supple. The sole cum heel component was like a slab of iron in its rigidity. Add to all this the fact that the nearest available grassland, at Endcliffe Park (‘Encs’ to us) was over a mile away.
Of course, when Charlie bestowed these treasures on me, and I didn’t immediately run outside, find 21 similarly shod little 6yr old chums, and organise them into a coach trip to ‘Encs’, he wrote me off as a wimp. The fact that I’d been ejected from three pubs in one night, before my 6th birthday didn’t impress him either, although it was two more than he ever scored, in his whole life.
In the yard next to the Vine, lived a family called Goodwin, with a little girl of my age- Anne. She was a little, golden-haired angel. Never stroppy, as most kids are at some time; always happy, friendly, content, outgoing. So why did she have to die? I don’t know how; just that it was illness rather than accident. I only remember the ache of the loss, the bewilderment of not understanding why, and the sadness of Anne’s family, grieving over her untimely and cruel removal from their lives.
Between Anne’s yard and the school, there was just one house, with a covered archway giving access to a stable yard at the back, all the domain of the Scott family. Mr Scott was some sort of journeyman, hence the stabling for the horse and cart- a flat dray. Their son, Graham, was a few years older than the rest of us and a bit wild. We kids generally gave him a wide birth. He was somewhat unpredictable. If you let him pass too close, you risked getting a ding in the lug, for no particular reason.
Graham got into some sort of trouble, eventually. I’ve no idea what, but it caused him to be committed to some sort of corrective institution, for a while. I don’t know whether they corrected anything, but when he came home, they had learned him to talk a bit posh. I distinctly remember him jumping down from the dray, when his father had collected him from the station, on the day of his return. He looked back up at his father and asked ‘Where’s my case? And it came out-
“Where is my cayse?” The old Graham would have asked-‘Weer’s me caise?’
Somehow, a posh talking Graham didn’t seem such a menace. He didn’t have the same ‘Krismer’.
Another horse-drawn vehicle I remember was a milk cart, although, in truth, it was a donkey, not a horse, in the shafts. The cart, itself was like a miniature governess cart, but lower slung, the pair of wheels being only 20” or so, bringing the cart bed to within 18” of the ground. This was handy for the milkman because we aren’t talking crates of bottles, here, but say half a dozen milk churns, which all had to be lifted, full, into the cart, at the star of the day’s trading., From those churns, the proprietor, a dapper little man in a bowler hat, not unlike Mr. Chaplin, dispensed draught milk.
There were several grades of milk, such as full fat, semi skilled, full cream, and richest of all- Channel Islands. A customer would come with a jug, and ask for a gill, or a pint, or a quart, and the man would plunge his long handled measure into the appropriate churn, withdraw it, full, and skilfully pour it into the customer’s jug, without spilling a drop.
 |
| The Milk Cart |
The service was already running parallel with bottle deliveries, and I don’t suppose he could have survived for much longer, so it is both sad and strange to remember that? I witnessed it, like a beautiful secret, soon to be hidden away for ever.