Any Old Iron

Part 6.
One of the things that you would notice before and during the war and then shortly after, that the streets were not so full of litter and rubbish as you see now. What you would see was lots of cigarette buts or fag ends as we here used to call them, together with horse manure, heaps of that. Now it did not stay there very long as people were keen to get this for their gardens and allotments, sometimes it was like some athletic event where people used to be making a mad dash as to who could get there first with their bucket and shovel, even though there always seemed to be plenty to go round it was like gold to some folk. Maybe that’s were the saying came from where there’s muck there’s money, people old men in particular used to take a great pride in their gardens and their little huts used to be like quaint little cottages inside. Most of these allotments now have vanished as councils have taken them to build houses, or other developments. All the streets then were cobbled stones or most of them were, and a lot of the traffic was still horse drawn like the coalman, the milkman, fish sellers although there was still fishwives as we called them pushing hand carts or rollies as they were once called. Beer was always delivered by Dray horses, and there were still street sellers like the Vinegar man the knife sharpener these people used to push their specialised carts by hand. There was also the Ringtons tea man, he has not long been finished using the horse drawn carriage, and they were always nicely kept. There was a man who used to get into the market square with a little stall which ingeniously opened up like a soft drinks bar, it was very ornate, pale green in colour with little wooden barrels and he sold still soft drinks. Often outside our house the Grange laundry van used to park, it was white with a picture of a woman crossing stepping stones in a river; she carried a laundry basket on her head. A t that time there was a song which was called “You Made Me Love You” then went onto say I didn’t want to do it I didn’t want to do it, I thought in my young mind that this woman on the side of the laundry van, who was being forced to love someone. I wondered why no one would try to help this poor woman, but that’s what I thought at the time; young minds eh. I would just like to add that this laundry van was just like Jack Jones the butchers on Dads Army; only it was white.The dockyards used to be close to our houses and you could hear them riveting all night, in the morning the buzzer or whistle would go for the men to start their day shift; the docks were what German aircraft were aiming for.Usually in the morning after the air raids all the kids would go yelling like little Indians to a place that had been bombed, we were all looking for souvenirs bits of incendiary bombs shrapnel barrage balloon skin and spent tracer bullets. My two older brothers had quite a collection that was very heavy. So they used to put me in this old box on wheels with this treasure trove of mangled metal bomb flights and tracer bullets.

Those Miserable Happy Times

Part 5.

When we moved to our new home in the County Durham countryside which lay between Bishop Auckland and Willington, I had to start school for the first time it was a nice clean modern building for that time, and the kids in the school were quite tidy looking compared to back home where I came from.I did eventfully settle in there and become just like one of the locals, I remember all we boys used to draw and paint pictures of the war, mostly aircraft pictures, Spitfires and Hurricanes seemed to be the favourites of all of us. Every boy wanted to be a Spitfire pilot all the girls wanted to nurses, their pictures were scenes like nurse tending the wounded, or just household scenes helping their mothers. Whereas we would paint pictures of dogfights with German planes going down in flames or bombers drop bombs on Berlin, usually with the caption “Bombs over Berlin”. Often when we went to town to see some war picture, something like Errol Flynn and his crew being shot down over Germany in a Lancaster Bomber then escaping back to England; we each would all adopt one of the characters rolls and re-enact the whole picture. Well boys will be boys so the saying goes and we were no exception, on the school walls we used to have pictures of double the size of A3 posters, there would be a story on one side and a coloured picture on the other side. The pictures used to be scenes of things like the Sea Side, Harvest time or Christmas time, I always liked harvest time the summer months were peaceful leading up to the threshing of the wheat, there was a farm right next to the school we kids liked to watch the threshing. We would climb onto the fence and watch the farm hands using their pitchforks to pitch the wheat into the machine, there were always a couple of Jack Russell’s to catch the rats as they scurried out of the haystacks, we little ghouls used to shout with glee when they caught the rats and flicked them up in the air. Sometimes one of the rats would reach the fence and run vertically up sending us all scurrying off in all directions, but the main bit I liked was the reaping, those golden coloured fields and the warm evenings, that gold coloured sun beginning to descend in the sky; it was idyllic. Usually in the darker nights over in the distance towards Middlesbrough, the sky used to light up with the explosions and searchlights, we could always tell when there was a raid on. An odd time we would hear that some village was going to get oranges in and we would catch the bus and stand in a queue, much to the annoyance of the locals, you would only be entitled to one per ration book. In the village where I lived this little shop come post office got some candy rock in, it was a little bit thicker than a pencil and was only available on children’s ration books, it was two pennies a stick, highway robbery. That was the only time I saw sweets other than Christmas day, although I’ve been told since sweets were available in other parts of the country, more so in the South of England.