Cricket wasn’t a game I cared for but when a bat and stumps appeared
from somewhere, I joined the rest of the lads in a game on the field at dinner
time. Clive Ward could have been the star of an otherwise ordinary show if it
hadn’t been for Stephen Browning, who ruined the game for everyone by being so
good. Getting Stephen out wasn’t just difficult, it was almost impossible.
Sometimes he carried his innings through to the next day and when we did manage
a breakthrough; our batting was so poor that in next to no time, Stephen was
batting again. Little wonder that our interest in the game soon passed.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Ginger haired, freckled faced Stephen excelled
at all sports, even boxing. Not that I saw him box for real, but he was quick and
he was agile, and when he bobbed and weaved and danced around like a real boxer, the flurry of punches he threw in
jest were enough to discourage any thoughts of a challenge.
Stephen was just one of a widening circle of friends that I met up with
out of school. From calling for him at his home at 32 Rolvenden Avenue I got to
know his younger brother Terry and, to varying degrees, his neighbours;
brothers Brian, Dave and Michael Wren, their cousin Kelvin, Christopher and
Gillian Burrows, and Donald and Robert Mitchell.
Somewhere between Rolvenden
Avenue and Pump Lane a large area of land had been
divided into cultivated sub plots. Along with Stephen and a bunch of Rolvenden Avenue
kids I found myself in the middle of it one weekend afternoon. Not knowing what
an allotment was it amazed me to have stumbled upon this source of free food. When
others started snapping off sticks of rhubarb, I did likewise. Then we heard a
child calling to us; a child with a northern accent. Shouting through the rear
garden fence of a property that backed on to one side of the allotment was a
small boy of around five. Though his mum tried to coax him from the fence he
wasn’t having it. He wanted to talk to us and I’d have liked to have spoken to
him. We could have wandered over and said hello, but we did not. Instinct,
perhaps, told us it was time to get out of there so, when everyone started to
drift away I went too, albeit with some regret.
The Battle of Pork Chop Hill: On a light summer
evening another escapade saw me and Stephen clambering up a mountain of soil
and rubble that had sprung up on a new development on Pump Lane – the site of what would become
the new technical school. Kids of our age and older were swarming all over Pork
Chop Hill – as I called it, after a film recently screened on the telly – and with
more arriving by the minute, the scene was set for a stone fight between those
on the hill, and the new arrivals. Ammunition was plentiful and from a position
of cover, it was great fun to stick my head above the skyline, chuck a stone,
and duck down again. Until…
Argh!
…I took a direct hit on the back of the head.
Rubbing the cartoon-sized lump on my nut, I scrambled down the safe side
of the hill, whereupon I departed from the battle zone as quickly as I could,
never to return.
Paul Parker, Kim Erswell and Bimbo Hollands were just some of the
friends I met up with out of school. Another was Clive Ward. It wasn’t unusual
to see Clive and his brother Peter playing football with next door neighbour
Stephen ‘Wally’ Wallington on the grass strip that fronted the Ward house at 42 Milsted Road, and
the Wallington house at 44. They played cricket too, with stumps marked in
chalk on the garden wall of the corner house on the other side of Wally’s.
Wally was a year older than me and Clive, and most of the time he was okay, but
he showed his sneaky side on the day he dared me to climb the drainpipe at the
front of his house. Fine, but I’d no sooner taken up the challenge when he
grabbed me by the legs and dragged me off. Funny for everyone: except me, as there
was no fun in having my hands and forearms scraped down the wall. No surprise then that I
stopped going down Milsted Road
after that.
Ronald Cross, another classmate, lived at the top of Pump Lane, at number 4. A few of us went
to Ronald’s house on several occasions after school to play cricket, amongst
other things, in his back garden. As poor as we were the game gave us a few laughs
and an opportunity to bat while Stephen Browning wasn’t around. Luckily, I
wasn’t there on the occasion a shed window got broken.
Kevin Garlick: “I remember the
cricket incident very well as I was that demon batsman. I never liked
cricket much as I could not understand why you would want to stand there and let
somebody chuck something as hard as a cannon ball at you and all you have to
defend yourself with is a bit of wood. So there I was, Bimbo chucked the ball
and in self defence I gave it a mighty whack, yes straight through the shed window. There
I was thinking oh bugger there`s my pocket money gone for the next ten years
but Ronald`s dad was ok about it and said not to worry, much to my relief. Yes,
Ronald lived up Pump Lane
in a big posh house, we used to play there as his garden was huge. Ronald had
an older sister and I remember Ronald and Bimbo Hollands pulling on pairs of
her knickers over their trousers so they could run around the garden as Bat Man
Bimbo and Ronald the Boy Wonder.”
Sock! Biff! Slam! Batman, a new television series, was unlike anything seen
before and a must see programme for me and my friends. Wearing our coats like
capes was a brilliant idea and how we laughed when we ran home from school with
our ‘capes’ flapping behind us.
‘Dada-dada-dada-dada Batman!’
There was more ‘Dada dada-ing’ at home. Making a bat symbol and sticking
it on a torch was a simple idea that provided great excitement at bedtime.
Especially after dark.
‘Dada-dada-dada-dada Batman!’ we sang as the bat symbol flashed over our
curtains and across the ceiling.
Till Dad shouted up the stairs ‘Get to bloody sleep!’
At Kevin Garlick’s house on Waltham
Road I admired the General Jumbo style hat he had,
and the General Jumbo remote controller/wrist band that his mum had knocked up
on her sewing machine. That Kev’s mum was handy at making things like that was
no surprise, as I’d seen the Tivvy toys and Gonks that she’d made previously.
When Kev and I weren’t playing with toy soldiers we were finding other
amusements. Kev’s dad was a painter and decorator – as was mine – who always
had a few spare rolls of wallpaper; handy on rainy days, for spreading out on
the dining room table and doodling on.
On sunny days we were in the garden, sometimes in the back, sometimes in
the front, where we picked caterpillars from the tree by the living room
window. On that same spot we put on plastic helmets while we whacked each other
over the head with rolled up newspapers.
‘Hang on a mo,’ said Kev, interrupting a fairly even contest to nip into
the house.
Believing my friend needed the toilet, I waited outside.
I should have sensed something was wrong when Kev reappeared wearing the
smile of the grim reaper, as the next blow to the head dropped me like a sack
of cement. It was then that my laughing friend showed me the poker he’d hidden in
his newspaper.
At school, Kevin recruited the boys of 4/2 to join his newly founded
Kellog Club, an initiative greeted by all with a mixture of wonder and
puzzlement. Other than free membership and a home made badge – cut from a
cereal box and fixed with a safety pin – the benefits were few but being a
member of an exclusive club was fun while it lasted.
Also at school, Andrew Akehurst thought it would be funny to dip my head as I took a drink from the playground water fountain. I might have thought so too if the joke hadn’t taken a strip of skin off the side of my nose. Ouch!
Also at school, Andrew Akehurst thought it would be funny to dip my head as I took a drink from the playground water fountain. I might have thought so too if the joke hadn’t taken a strip of skin off the side of my nose. Ouch!
No comments:
Post a Comment