Merlinkeith

I suppose it was scrap, but we loved them and played ‘offices’ pressing the buttons and pretending to talk to one another. It made time fly.

There were also bars at the window (for our own safety again) but at times we felt like prisoners.

School holidays were great fun to us living right next to the Forest Ground where the Goose Fair was held every year was so exciting.

When we were seven we moved to a new class at school, and that turned out to be two classrooms on the Forest site.

Today those classrooms are now a scout hut.

We loved playtime when the Goose Fair came, and we would watch the caravans arriving and set up for the fair.

After the fair left on the Sunday, we (the gang) would run onto the Forest to find all sorts of things left by the hundreds of folks who’d been there over those last three days. Half pennies, Pennies, and if you were really lucky, Sixpences would be found.

My best treasure was a silver heart on a chain that opened. I kept that for years.

The Forest was a great place to get lost, there was a recreation park in the middle with swings, see-saws and slides. Chrissie and I would play there and pretend we had different names.

The play area was more on the upper side of the Forest. The lower ground had football and cricket pitches. There was a very high, long wall that separated the hilly part from the area where the Goose Fair used.

One day we kids decided to walk on the edge of that wall holding on to the railings and whilst walking, I lost my balance and fell onto a load of boulders on the lower part. I struggled with help, and mum had to take me to the doctors on a borrowed push chair. From there I was set to the Children’s Hospital for x-rays, and thank the Lord I was just badly bruised which meant I was off school for two weeks. Mum and Dad were furious with me – Typical!

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When Dad came home from work on Fridays he always brought an Eagle comic for us.

What a lark, as it was a boys comic and I think he enjoyed reading it more than we did.

When we were about ten years old he came in with the usual Eagle comic and the news that we were moving home.

He told us we were going to live in Beeston Rylands in a three bedroomed house.

It was in a terrace of four houses right next to Ericsson’s factory.

We were so excited, and when we moved, we moved in a moving van as no one had a car then. (Except our Grandpa and Nanny, and there was no way he was going to let us use it. I suppose because dad hadn’t a driving licence).

Chrissie and I had our own room with twin beds, and our own chest of drawers – we were rich!

We had a long garden too, a coal house and of course an outside toilet. We weren’t too far away from the river Trent and had a recreation park five or six minutes’ walk away.

Trafalgar Road, (that was our new address) brought workers to Ericsson’s on buses – lots of them.

Working folk didn’t have cars then, but they did have bicycles and they parked them in the nearby empty cycle parks. These cycle parks were at the other end of the factory site, so for convenience, quite a few homes, including ours, offered their back yards as a place to leave their bikes for sixpence a week.

My mum received half a crown every Friday from the cyclists which was much needed.

Once the workers had entered the factory, we had a great play space.

Hide and seek, whips and tops, skipping with ropes across the road etc. We borrowed roller skates from friends too.

We had lots of fun, and at night time, because the factory was lit up, we played hide and seek and rang people’s door bells then ran off and hid. There were plenty of places to hide.

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Dad

My dad was an ‘only one’ and had a lovely mum (my nanny) who was a nurse. She was small, petite, had a lovely smile, and a warm natural aura.

Grandpa was 6 foot 4 inches, big boned and had a deep voice, and he knocked my dad about when he was young.

He had a nasty streak in him and no one in our family liked him.

(I later learned they had to get married!)

My dad grew up in an unhappy environment, so ‘joining up’ was good for him. But then like his father, he himself had to get married because Kathleen (Kay) my mum was expecting twins. He was given leave to get married just three weeks before we were born.

(In those days we were known as ‘white knuckle babies’.)

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Then he was off to Borneo in the Royal Navy for the next two years.

When he eventually arrived back home he was living with his mother-in-law etc. as I said earlier in the story.

We had no garden, and so in between cycling to and from Beeston every day, and listening to my grandma nattering on, he took to making things out of wood.

I can see him now, working away at building us an amazing doll’s house, a farm and a church. He also designed and made puppets. He had puppets hanging from the ceiling all around our one downstairs room, I have no idea who they were for.

Yes the doll’s house was ours. That ended up in our bedroom, but we never played with the puppets.

So you can see the tension building up in that one room downstairs with my dad cutting and sawing, and my baby brother in his pram.

When it was raining, Chrissie and I were sent upstairs out of the way as my mum and mamma were trying to cook, wash and clean etc. in such close proximity.

One good thing was my dad was not a drinker, he’d experienced things in the navy that were due to drink.

He had a lot of patience but when it finally broke there were words said etc.

So when we moved to Beeston Rylands you can imagine the joy he and my mum must have felt. To have two living rooms and a big kitchen was like living in a palace. To be able to walk to work, come home for dinner every day and relax without your mother-in-law moaning all the time was just perfection for him.   

He still showed no interest in Chrissie or me. He never asked us how we were doing at school, but he always had something to write about on our school reports.

He enjoyed my brother Mike, teaching him all sorts of things. He built him an amazing Go-Cart and would go for walks by the river with him peddling like mad alongside.

Then dad had the idea of building a model railway, so the back room (our dining room) was his workshop. He built a huge wooden frame that fitted over the dining table. From then on he spent every evening and week end building an amazing railway with stations, a little village and forests.

We had that railway until well after I was married. It used to lean on the back wall in all its glory and we had to walk by it to get to the kitchen and back to the front room where the settee and other furniture was.

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Dad with 'the twins' Mike and the model railway

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Even when we had a TV set installed the only things he watched were Formula 1, and motor bike scrambling on Sunday Mornings featuring Arthur Lampkin!

Later he took up photography and had an amazing Rolex camera. Then he would go to different railway places with Mike and take endless photographs.

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Then guess what happened! The cupboard under the stairs known as the ‘Cubby Hole’ was emptied so he could build a dark room where he developed his negatives. He would emerge with strips of negatives which he hung on the large standard lamp in the lounge with bulldog clips, which drove my mum mad at times.

There was always money available for dad’s hobbies. We had a small amount of pocket money. (2 pence for every year of our lives).

Being an electrician, dad was always repairing neighbours irons, electric kettles etc. So dad was always busy doing what he wanted and what he loved, but he was not interested in anything Chrissie and I did.

He was pleased when we were married so he could then have enough money to buy a car and take Mike to motorbike meetings, railway stations etc.

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School Life Plus

 

When we started Beeston Rylands Junior School we were placed in the third year. There were nearly 50 pupils in the class, a mixed bag of boys and girls. Mr Fricker was our teacher, and he taught us Maths, English and a bit of geography. I can’t remember any history lessons, or anything else. I continued to enjoy my English lessons, and I continued with my poetry too. I always received good marks for English, ‘sums’ as we used to call it was o.k. We didn’t do fractions or anything more serious until we reached senior school.

What little music we had was on the radio once a week – so boring! Ta Tate Ta etc. Yuk!

We continued playing endless games of hopscotch, skipping, hide and seek etc.

About this time I had my first ever boyfriend, Keith Hill. He used to come to school on his bike, and give me a ride home on his cross bar. In the summer I invited him for tea in the garden and mum made us a plate of potted meat sandwiches. When mum disappeared he gave me a present.

When I opened it I was so thrilled as it was a very shiny brooch of a ballerina. I was over the moon and wore it inside my dress whilst at school. All through that summer we had great fun with our school mates, and Chrissie too had a boyfriend called Michael.

One day back at school Keith said to me “I want that brooch back” I was shocked and asked why, he replied he had to give it back to his mother as he had taken it from her jewellery box and she had asked him where it had gone. When Keith told her what he had done she demanded it back.

So that was the end of that friendship.

Then we took out 11plus exam.

We had no idea we were taking it – just another ‘test’. Chrissie and I were ‘border line failures’.

We hadn’t a clue about many of the questions, we had never studied the subjects, for example:

What were the suffragettes? I put ‘a new type of aeroplane’ as I had never heard the word and it sounded like a jet plane.

So at the end of term we were just two of many that went on to senior school. The boys went on to Beeston Fields Secondary Modern School, the girls to Nether Street School for Girls.

A new chapter in our lives began.

The school made history because we had a new headmistress who was promoted from history teacher to head and was also of Indian heritage.

It was unheard of to hold that office in 1956. Her name was Hilary Helen Herring, and one of the things I remember was she always used a green pen to sign anything and to mark our work. Also she always wore a blouse and dirndl type skirt with a belt. She was firm but fair and taught us girls how to be young ladies. She had certain words for things which we had to remember and use, one of which stands out in my memory.

It was drilled into us in assembly that the girl’s toilets were to be called the Zany . You were in trouble if you didn’t use that word, it seems laughable now, but it was deadly serious then.

And didn’t it cause a stir because we had to wear a uniform! The uniform didn’t go down well at home, uniform shops were expensive. But Miss Herring was good in saying as long as your skirt and cardigan is bottle green and your blouse white, then it didn’t have to be from the official school store. So mum started knitting us a cardigan in bottle green wool, and asked our auntie Jackie if she had a white blouse and a bottle green skirt. It caused a bit of bother as mum and dad moaned about the cost, but as Chrissie and I said, dad always found the money for his train set, his camera equipment and his other hobbies.

Chrissie and I settled in well. We belonged to St. Patrick’s House and St. Andrews House, the other two houses were St. George and St. David.

The work that we did in our books was marked out of ten and if we did well we received a ‘credit’ and that went into a notebook we carried in our satchels. If your work was bad and not done well you received a ‘discredit’. Every so often we had house meetings to find who was ‘top’.

Also we had prefects, girls were picked to do extra good things and keep an eye on the class if the teacher had to leave the room for something important. Some of the girls who were prefects were really ‘bossy boots’ especially when you had to walk up the stairs to the upper floor for lessons. All you heard from each prefect on each landing was “keep to the right hand side” and didn’t they think they were ‘it’ especially as they wore a badge too. Chrissie and I were in the same class for three years, the final year I went into 4FE (further education) and stayed on for another term. Chrissie went into 4PN (pre-nursing) not that Chrissie wanted to be a nurse, but she certainly didn’t want to stay at school longer than necessary.

Every Friday at school was ‘Cookery Day’. There was a proper cooking centre at Nether Street with ovens and all the equipment needed. We were taught all about protein, what was nourishing food and where it was found, and then we had to cook or bake something every week. We had a cookery basket at home into which we had to buy and put in what was needed each week. A lot of the time mum was pleased as punch because she didn’t have to cook on Fridays, and she had two baskets of whatever we made. There was the occasional thing we made that didn’t go down too well!  

I stayed near the top of the class for most subjects except maths.

Our maths teacher, Miss Williams was horrible. She was small and very old and had no idea how to teach girls who had never done fractions etc. She would throw the chalk at you and very often sent girls to Miss Herring’s study. I only ever went once, and Miss Herring was most understanding, she obviously knew what Miss Herring was like.

I loved English, I loved writing stories, and I always received good marks. Quite often I was awarded a ‘credit’ from Miss Jaycock, she was young and very pretty. Sewing class wasn’t too good either. Mum was never a sewer at home, and we had to make things like toilet bags and skirts.

One year it was a pair of pyjamas. You were expected to buy all the materials yourself and mum couldn’t cope with that. Any old fabric from the market would do for us, and I used to feel embarrassed.

At home, when we reached 13 Chrissie and I became ‘papergirls’.

There was a newsagent on the corner of our road and when they had vacancies we were given a round for 10 shillings a week (50p today). It was exciting as we could now go to the shops and buy the occasional blouse, skirt or nylons for ourselves – Joy!

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So at 6am we did our rounds before school, and when we came home from school we did the evening papers before tea-time. On Saturday mornings we had to go and collect the payment for the papers from our round as most people were at home then. We received the odd sixpence tip, but at Christmas we received lots of half a crowns (2 shillings and 6 pence) from our customers – Much Joy!

Back at school, I really enjoyed out art classes. We had a very tall young handsome man called Mr. Amery who took us for art. I had one or two of my paintings pinned on the wall, and he was very encouraging. As this was the 1950’s it was unusual to have a young male teacher.

Our history and geography teacher was Mr. Williams, a fat old fellow with a Welsh accent who spat a lot when he was talking. Our science teacher was a small oldish fellow who also took us for religious instruction (R.I.).

P.E. was a waste of time for most of us.

We kept or P.E. kit in cages in the storeroom, (bottle green vest and knickers). They were washed once a term – can you believe? We played netball with our P.E. teacher, a plump lady called Mr. Smith. I still don’t know the ins and outs of how to play, who was goalie etc. In the summer we had a kind of ‘sports day’. A few running races and three-legged races. Nothing to write home about. And when it rained we did country dancing, what a lark that was!

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I did o.k. at school overall, made lots of friends, and had lots of laughs. Walking to school we would call on a couple of friends, and we sometimes sang a song or two on the way. Chrissie and I sat for our thirteen plus exam. The school thought we were capable of taking it – heaven knows why. After a very nervous, horrible day sitting in big hall taking it, we waited a while to see who had passed.

There were about 25-30 girls who sat, and just one girl who passed, a girl from our class called Arlene Glenn.

She was one of our pals, but once she had left at the end of term, we never heard from her again.

During those years at senior school we became a ‘gang’.

There were about eight of us including two lads, one from Beeston Fields and one who live opposite out house.

Over the three or four years some joined and some left. Right outside our house was the Ericsson’s factory which had a night shift and so there were always a lot of lights on for us to have great fun ‘mucking about’ and playing hide and seek and other games. We only went indoors when it was time for bed which was around 8pm.

 

When we moved to Beeston Rylands one of the things we did was to join a Sunday school. 90% of children went to Sunday school because all shops and entertainments were closed on Sundays, and it seemed mums and dads wanted a bit of peace and quiet too! So off we went at two o clock on a Sunday afternoon to the Victory Road Methodist Mission for an hour where we learned the stories from the bible and sang chorus songs to do with Jesus.

Once a year it was ‘Anniversary Sunday’ where a platform was built inside the Mission at the front.

We learned new songs and some of us learned a poem or a song to sing or say to our mums and dads on the actual anniversary day. If I remember, only my mum came and that was only once too.

Also once a year we had a day out in the summer – on a bus to an adventure park, and once we went to Drayton Manor Park. We took a packed lunch and had a whale of a time playing rounders’ and singing songs.

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During the long summer holidays we would wander off down the river and make dens, or go on the weir field and play rounders’. We loved playing rounders’ outside our house too, because there were four posts about four feet high and perfectly spaced to play the game.

I’ve lost count of the number of games we played there, sometimes it was boys against girls – great fun.

One or two neighbours come out and shout to us “shut up and stop being so noisy” They were fun times.

It’s interesting to think that today children don’t seem to ‘play out’ in gangs, winter and summer. They have warm bedrooms to sit in with computers or laptops, or they can watch wonderful films on the many channels available these days. For many years we only had the BBC channel then ITV came along, now it’s endless.

If dad and Mike were at their model car club we used to take our Dansette record player into the middle room and play our records (not too loud of course). We enjoyed playing our records whenever we could.

Saturday mornings in the winter when we couldn’t play out, we would ask our friends round for an hour or so to play and learn to dance with each other to rock n’ roll stuff. Mum would be shopping in Beeston with our neighbour Vera and dad would be at work for the morning so we would be free, hurrah!

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The Dansette in the middle room with Chrissie.

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Holidays

 

Our very first holiday as a family was in a caravan at Mablethorpe, mum was getting things ready weeks before. We had no car so we were to travel there on the bus, or occasionally the train. Because of this mum arranged for a lorry to come the week before we travelled to take a huge trunk containing all our clothes, blankets and everything else we needed.

That meant for us that a month before it happened, mum was busy washing, ironing, and packing all our clothes in the trunk in readiness for the journey. So we ended up wearing old clothes that were a size too small for us. We felt rather silly trying to explain why we were dressed so.

The caravan was o.k. Basic, no bathroom/toilet but there were facilities on the site for that. We also had a huge beach tent that we rented for two weeks so we could keep our buckets and spades and kite stuff in there. Dad and Mike had endless fun flying their kites – they call it ‘bonding’ today. Dad also made a game called Jokari. It was a large block of wood filled with lead.  Fastened to it was a long length of very thick elastic with a sponge rubber ball attached. We had table tennis bats to bash the ball so it stretched out and you had to keep playing and hitting the ball. Sometimes we played in pairs side-by-side, it was great fun, and the challenge was who could keep hitting it the longest and fastest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing Jokari

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We made friends with the family in the next tent and kept in touch with them for many years. They lived in Bilborough.

We loved playing hide and seek in the sand hills, a great place to play and you could stay all day – or until you were hungry.

When we started senior school and made new friends, mum and dad got to know some of their parents too because we often went to each other’s homes in the evenings after our paper rounds.

The consequence was that in our teens we all began going to Whitby in Yorkshire and we stayed in a flat.

Our friends Pam and Anita with their mum and dad, Flo and Bill came too and stayed in a flat next to ours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Whitby with a very young Buster

 

Each day we would all go down to the pullover (concrete walkway) and get all the deckchairs and beach stuff out of the wooden chalet we rented for the holiday.And that is where our parents would stay all day until half past four or five drinking endless cups of tea. We played Jokari on the pullover for hours

Whitby is well known as a fishing port and in those days there used to be hundreds of small fishing boats which set out to sea every evening about 8-30 (except Sunday)

With other holidaymakers we’d go down to the harbour and watch and wave them off. They would return at about 6-30 in the morning loaded down with herring, and guess what. Chrissie and I would quietly tip toe down the stairs and along with Pam we would run down to the harbour and watch them unload the boats. In the late 50’s and early 60’s they unloaded by hooking the baskets (called crans) full of fish and swinging them over to the harbour side on a crane.

We got to know one or two of them by name.

On Saturday nights the Dutch fishing fleet would come into the harbour and stay overnight, all of them wore traditional wooden clogs,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We returned to Whitby all through our teenage years and two of the fisherman, one called Bobby were ‘boyfriends’ so every year we couldn’t wait to go back to see them. Pam made a strong relationship with Bobby and Chrissie with Barry which they kept going for quite a while, purely as friends. I made a friend with a boy whose name I can’t remember, only for the holiday, but it was fun to meet up the following year.

Dad and Bill kept up their kite flying and photography and would occasionally wander off looking for good photoshoots.

Those days on holiday were happy times. We were given a lot more freedom, freedom to play in the penny arcades, free to wander through the town in the gift shops. Those were innocent days.

One of the restaurants in Whitby was the ‘Magpie’ renowned for its high quality fish and chips. We could never afford to go in there.

 

Many years later when our dad died we travelled to Whitby to arrange for the life boat to take his ashes out to sea, as he was an R.L.N.I. member for many years. Whilst we were there we had a super meal in the Magpie to say our goodbyes to dad. One thing Chrissie and I did was to make a ‘chip buttie’ and we held it up and said “bye dad” because never ever when he was alive would he allow us to make a buttie – ever

So on this special occasion we couldn’t wait to say “cheerio dad” and wave our chip butties in the air.

 

Whenever you go to Whitby everyone has to climb the 199 steps to Whitby Abbey. It is very historical and we learned that the Abbess Hild held a conference there where the date of Easter was decided upon. Also the views are amazing.

There is also St. Mary’s church there where Captain James Cook, the famous mariner worshipped when he was a cadet. And I’ve actually sat in the seat he used! During his time in Whitby he lived in a small terraced house in Grape Lane.

We had many fun times in our teen age years in those two weeks every August, and we saw dad in a totally different way altogether. When we returned home we spent many happy evenings looking at the slides dad had taken during our holidays on a large screen in the middle room and re-living the moments together.

When life settled back to normal mum and dad met up with Flo and Bill once a month or so and talked of happy days in Whitby.

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