The whole country was euphoric the papers said. Bobby Moore’s lifting of the trophy, Geoff Hurst’s hat trick, Nobby Stiles’ victory jig and the sight of some miserable looking Germans were fresh in the memory and things to cherish. In this wonderful, joyous climate, England’s glory was relived daily on every inch of green and pleasant land from Land’s End to Beeching’s playing fields, as boys like me played football until the sun went down.
On the pitch by
Pluckley Close one morning, I saw the Chitty Brothers arrive with their
football.
‘Who are you
being, Barry?’ asked Adrian, a wavy haired boy a year younger than me.
‘I’m being England,’ said Adrian’s little brother Barry.
‘You can’t be England. I’m England. You’ll
have to be someone else.’
‘Okay,’ said Barry.
‘I’ll be Portskull then.’
Barry’s
mispronunciation of Portugal
tickled me enough to remember it always.
Not everyone was playing
football…
Some were playing
cricket, including Clive Ward who was bowling to John Smith, who I knew
by sight as a confident kid from the year below us at school.
‘A typical
Graveney stroke,’ said John, as he laid a dead bat on a ball that went absolutely
nowhere.
What a boring
sport, I thought.
~
William ‘Bimbo’ Hollands no longer called
for me at my house; understandably, as on his last visit my dad almost choked
him. The flashpoint came when Dad answered the knock at the door. As the door
opened Bim caught sight of me sitting in the front room with my little brother
Garry on my lap, feeding him his bottle. Amused, Bimbo laughed. Enraged, my dad
grabbed him by the throat.
‘M-mister Lynch’ Bimbo
croaked, as Dad shoved him away and slammed the door on him.
As Bim no longer called for me, I called for him at his house on Pump Lane…
The two of us went watching a
judo class at Bowaters one evening. The
combatants were very respectful, bowing to each other before and after each
contest. One of them, a boy called Tonge, I recognised as an older kid who’d
been at the juniors. Bimbo and I went again the following week and though I
acquired some knowledge of the moves – which had Japanese names like Ogoshi – I
wasn’t tempted to sign up for lessons. But Bimbo did.
William Hollands: “Yes, I did do Judo at Bowaters! True, did it for about two months. Had the suit, did the first test, passed and got a stripe.”
On a scorching hot afternoon Paul
Parker, Bimbo and I set off from Bimbo’s house to venture beyond the top road
(a parental boundary) to the forbidden zone (the Darland Banks), taking a
bottle of water for refreshment. On arrival we came across an upturned car bonnet
with a piece of rope attached. Nearby was a sheet of corrugated iron. As the
purpose of each was obvious I was bombing downhill in a matter of seconds on the
upturned car bonnet, enjoying an exhilarating ride on something perfectly shaped
to ride every dip and bump. Sadly, the sheet of corrugated iron was not. Paul
and Bimbo came a cropper at the first dip when their makeshift sledge jarred
and flung them off. Apart from taking a tumble, Paul came out of it unscathed
but Bim was not so lucky. He’d been gripping the side of the corrugated iron sheet
and suffered a nasty gash to his hand that needed urgent attention. Keeping the
wound clean by sloshing water on it at regular intervals, we got Bimbo home as
fast as we could. Police Sergeant Hollands was not happy when we arrived at his
door with his injured son. Though we did our best to explain, I sensed – under the
hateful stare of a man looking down on the two ruffians who’d led his son
astray – that we were wasting our breath. He was still scowling when Paul and I
gave up and backtracked to the garden gate. There was no banishment, as such, but
we considered it wise to stay clear of Bimbo’s for a while.
~
My first encounter with a
dentist occurred when Mam sent me to Twydall Green Clinic with a terrible
toothache. The dentist, an aging chap in a white overall was bad tempered and nasty,
even in the presence of his lady assistant. His records showed I’d missed an
appointment in 1962, which drew scathing criticism. ‘But your sort don’t care,
do you? You don’t give that!’ he
said, flicking a V sign at me after checking that his assistant’s back was
turned.
I had no recollection of a
dental check up, anywhere or anytime, let alone an appointment made when I was
seven years old, possibly at school. As for the V sign I had no idea what it
meant. Nor did I know what he meant by my sort. Shaken, I did as I was told and
lay back in the dental chair, where I had a tooth pulled, brutally and without
anaesthetic by the dentist from hell. I was still sobbing when I returned home
and slumped in an armchair. Mam must have thought I’d gone soft; an eleven
years old crying over a tooth out but she didn’t know the half of it, nor would
she ever, as I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.
~
The summer holiday put the mockers
on a post-fight reconciliation with my old friend Kev, and with Bimbo off limits after
the Darland Banks episode; I wandered in search of my own amusement.
On Patrixbourne Avenue I bumped into Leslie
Baker and a couple of others I’d known at the juniors. Good lads one and all but at the swings on
Woodchurch Crescent, I kept well clear of an angry looking Douglas Field – Marion
Field’s big brother – as he quizzed people about someone’s whereabouts. Whoever
he was looking for, I was glad it wasn’t me.
An early evening stroll up Romany Road led to a
trudge in the freshly excavated trenches that had
been dug in preparation for the foundations of the new Catholic school.
It was on Woodchurch Crescent
one evening that I and other strays got roped into playing cricket with
the Tully family; Danny, Stephen and a couple of adult relations, who set up
stumps near the Sturry Way/ Romany Road junction. Delegated to a distant
fielding position down by the swings, my part was entirely peripheral, as between
fleeting moments of involvement there were long spells of tedium. By the time
night closed in I’d had enough of being a mug, and slipped away in the
darkness.
 |
| Paul Parker's house at 7 Wingham Close |
As the holidays progressed I
spent more and more time with Paul Parker in Wingham Close. Playing football, mostly,
though we did find time to sit on the back step of his house at number 7 and
browse through his mum’s catalogue; starting with the toys, as ever. In due
course we arrived at the ladies underwear pages which we found highly amusing
until Paul’s mum, alerted by our laughter, pounced to shame us by laughing at the
boys’ underwear section.
Paul’s dad acquired a
collection of old 78s, an ancient wind up gramophone and a good supply of spare
needles from somewhere, which he graciously allowed Paul to play with. Thus, many
happy hours were spent sitting outside with the gramophone on Paul’s front wall,
listening to songs such as Gracie Fields’ I’m 99 today.
~
Sitting on that same garden
wall and getting whacked over the head with a large sheet of plywood was much less
enjoyable. Peter Gardner, a neighbour and friend of Paul’s brother Glenn was
the culprit. Why Peter should do that, two handed, coldly and without
provocation, made no sense. I remained calm when he did it a second time, a third
time and even a fourth time before I got up and walked away, hurting. Peter, a
year younger than me, only got away with it because there was a big brother to
consider. Otherwise, the very least he deserved was a taste of his own
medicine.
Almost as bad was the ragging
I got from Clive Mason, Tony Spicer and a bunch of others at dusk one evening.
Clive and Tony were older than me and lived on the opposite side of the close
to Paul. They’d never given me a scrap of trouble before but on this occasion
they had the devil in them. Intercepting
me before I could get to the alley, they roughed me up and shoved me around for
ages before I managed to get away.
Another person in debt to a
big brother was buck-toothed Peter Watling, who lived on one side of the alley
on Crundale Road.
Edwin Thomas lived on the other side and it was there, at the top of the alley
that the pair waylaid me on my way home from playing in Wingham Close. Both
were in my year at school and though neither had troubled me before, they
combined to give me a roughing up, driven by the laughing Peter, who found it
amusing to snort ‘snigger! snigger!’ as they rubbed their knuckles on my head.
Sometimes I was better off
staying home. My brothers and I looked hopefully at Mam each time the ice cream
man turned up. Sometimes we got lucky, sometimes not. Oyster Delights… mmm!
.jpg)
Outside our house at 43 Crundale Road, David
Webb and I were playing football, not with a ball, but with a small plastic
bucket; the kind used for making sand castles on a beach. I kicked it to David;
he kicked it back to me, I kicked it to David; he kicked it back to me. Getting
a toe cap into the bucket allowed me to scoop it up into the air so I did… and I
watched as the bucket skimmed across the top of next door’s overgrown hedge…
and come down by their gate… where it hit little Jill Heard on the head as she
stepped out onto the pavement. Not surprisingly, Jill burst into tears.
‘Gerard, come here!’
Just my rotten luck: Dad,
who’d been pottering about in our front garden, was now standing by our open
gate; grim faced, hand raised for all to see justice being done. Oh the humiliation.
‘Get in!’
I tried to duck, of course I
did, but it didn’t do any good; Dad caught me with a stinger.
 | |
| Rear: Me, Sandra, Andrew. Front: Michael, Garry, David. |
On a happier note, before the
summer was out the Lynch family had a day out picking blackberries at Sharps
Green.
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