11 Winter of 63

1963 began with snow, snow and more snow.  As wonderful as it was to make a snowman, there was little enthusiasm to build a second one; it was that cold. Monster icicles became commonplace as the big freeze dragged on and when more snow came, it was difficult to see where the pavement ended and the road started. Throughout it all school remained open. Few families had cars and kids trudged to school daily, not on pavements but on great slabs of ice. Thank goodness for hot water bottles and extra blankets at night.

There was still no let up in February when, two weeks after giving birth to my little brother Garry, Mam needed to go the shops. Just home from school I went with her, holding her hand. A good thing too, as when we turned the corner from Crundale Road into Minster Road the pair of us slipped and landed on our backsides. Though no harm was done, it served as a warning.  

The situation improved when council workmen cleared the compacted snow and ice from gateways and the outer half of each pavement, leaving huge slabs piled high against garden walls. The slabs stayed there till March when, at last, the temperature rose and a thaw came. Around that same time my brothers welcomed the arrival of our Granny Gray from Bolton, who’d come to live with us. Just as welcome were her homemade cakes, coconut ice and macaroons. And just as welcome were the new bunk beds we got that allowed us to pile into one room so Granny could have a room to herself.

The best thing about the weather that winter is that it kept me out of the clutches of my playtime tormentors. Whilst paths were cleared from the school gates to the huts and the canteen, most of the playground remained unusable, meaning dinner times and playtimes were spent reading soggy comics in the hall. It was then that I first saw American Superhero comics. In truth, I didn’t think much of them but the adverts they contained provoked great envy, as the toy soldiers in those adverts looked vastly superior to ours.

In class, I was doing fairly well with what seemed a heavy schedule. Between nit inspections, clean fingernail inspections and clean shoe inspections…

Paul Parker: “Miss Frankland insisted we had polished shoes and would inspect them, I think, on Monday mornings. My shoes would only shine on the edges and there was no fooling her when I deliberately bent my feet at the ankles in an effort to present my shoes at their best angle. She shouted at me ‘That’s not good enough Parker!”

…we worked hard on our cursive writing, written in ink with a scratchy nib on a stick. Thank heavens for blotting paper which, we learned, was also useful for helping a bean grow in a water filled jar on the windowsill. Good work was rewarded with a team point, a circular sticker in the colour of our team, which we stuck on balloon charts that adorned the room.

Spellings tests came thick and fast. Though I regularly scored eighteen out of twenty, I could have kicked myself on the occasion I wrote circus beginning with an S. Being an avid reader helped my spelling. Little Black Sambo and Chicken Licken were popular books but the first proper book I read was given to me by my mam, an old edition of Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton.

Art and Craft was a lesson I loved and when the class were asked to pick the best painting one day, I gave my vote to Ian Newman. His painting of a cowboy on horseback, silhouetted on a red and yellow sunset was as good as any painting I’d seen, that day or any other day and I admired it for a long time after when Miss pinned it up on the wall.

Anytime we needed to clean up, Miss Frankland led us round the quadrangle to the washbasins. Though she never hesitated to step into the boys’ section to tell us to hurry up, she didn’t venture too far, as an open corner of our washroom led straight to the toilets, where someone was always having a quick piddle.

Miss Frankland took us for most subjects, including PE, which usually meant throwing bean bags and rubber quoits around the hall. Miss Frankland was okay but on February 14th I saw a different side to her. Making a card seemed simple enough once I’d grasped the idea of what Valentine’s Day was about, but who did I love? No one, but Sally Heard (who lived next door to me on Crundale Road) was nice and came closest to fitting the bill, so I drew a big love heart and wrote ‘I love Sally Heard with all my heart, strength, might and main.’

Might and main? I didn’t know what it meant either, but I’d heard it somewhere and it sounded good. With the requirements of the exercise fulfilled I was satisfied. Not so Miss Frankland. As she passed by my desk and saw what I’d written, she went berserk and ordered me to stand up. A bawling out from her, in front of my classmates, reduced me to a trembling wreck; a shocked and confused trembling wreck, as I had no idea what I’d done wrong.

I got on the wrong side of Mrs. Thomas too. A fearsome woman with a raised wart on her face, she played the piano in assembly and took our class for music/singing lessons. In one such lesson the class were lined up at the front of the hall, singing songs from pamphlets that were shared one between two. On this particular day there was no ‘What Shall we do with a Drunken Sailor?’ or the soppy ‘Soldier Soldier won’t you Marry me?’ Instead, we found ourselves singing a new song.

From the moment I spotted the line ‘Lordy Mercy on my soul’ I was in trouble. Why? Because dog muck, in Bolton, was known to us as a load and its similarity to ‘Lordy’ (whatever that meant) had me struggling to hold back my laughter. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the image of a steaming turd on a soul out of my mind and it got worse when John Conway – sharing the quivering pamphlet with me – caught the giggles too.  By the time we sang ‘Lordy mercy on my soul’ the two of us were on the verge of collapsing.

Mrs. Thomas was not amused. She summoned us to the piano and demanded to know what we were laughing at. John, of course, really didn’t know and though I pleaded the same, Mrs. Thomas wasn’t having it.

‘That word’ I confessed, indicating the cause of it.

‘What’s so funny about it?’

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

Assuming we were idiots, Mrs. Thomas closed the matter by giving us a good smacking on the back of our bare legs.

(It’s a good thing we didn’t sing songs about a jimmy, as a jimmy, to my brothers and I, is what everyone else called a willy.)

~

A feature of school life was the visit of a policeman. PC Rossiter was a regular guest during my time at Twydall and though I can’t say he was the policeman that visited in our first year, the routine was always the same; a post assembly lecture on the kerb drill.

‘At the kerb… halt. Look left, look right, look left again. If the road is clear, quick march.’

~

And at the end of each school day…

‘Put your chairs on your desks… quietly! Right, hands together, eyes closed.’

Kevin Garlick: "Geoffrey Berry always asked the visiting policeman if he was the man from Z Cars."