Bike Gadget

In the town where I went to school, the roads belonged to bicycles. Everyone had one and nearly everyone used them. Four times a day, when the women rode to and from the clothing factory, or the children to and from school, or the men to and from the railways, docks and shipyard, they packed the roads three and four abreast. With no room to overtake, motor vehicles had to crawl along at bicycle speed. When the railway gates closed, cars, vans, lorries, buses, and even motor cycles had to wait patiently behind hoards of pedal cyclists who zig-zagged to the front of the queue. Who needed a motor car when you could ride everywhere on level roads for free? Pancake country. 

My brother had a speedometer on his bike. On windy days he could get up to 30. Pretty good with the heavy steel frames and Sturmey Archer three-speeds we had then. One day he rode up and down the street trying to go too fast through a police radar trap. They just laughed at him.

These last few sunny ‘lockdown’ weeks have seen me back on my bike more than in a long time. It is hilly where we live now, which has always put me off, but I’m getting used to it. I’ve worked out routes where the slopes are not too bad, and when they are I am not ashamed to stop for breath or even to get off and push. I keep my brakes on down hills and will need new brake blocks soon. I don’t care about the high-speed prats whizzing past on their carbon-fibre, disc-braked, thousand-pound machines as if only miles matter, or the bolt upright electric pootlers pedalling leisurely uphill with smug faces. Do your own thing! It doesn’t matter what they think. I am enjoying the clean air and quiet country lanes, all straight from the shed door. Glide like a bird with the wind in your feathers and sun on your wings. 

As John Denver said: Country roads take me home to the place I belong, West Yorkshire …  Here are a few pictures (click to enlarge):

Now, after all these years, I’ve got a speedometer too, not an analogue one with a ‘speedo cable’ like my brother’s in the sixties, but a “bicycle computer”. It works by timing the rotations of a tiny magnet fixed to one of the spokes. It has to be set up for the correct wheel size, but once that’s done then speed, distance and other details are all there at the touch of a button. The other day I did 7.04 miles in 47.31 minutes (excluding stops) at an average speed of 8.9 mph, reaching a top speed of 19.4 m.p.h. and burning 114 calories. It is not a good idea to fiddle with the display too much while riding.

My brother would have gone straight out and bought a better one. I wish he was still around to do so.

The Yellow Shed

Three views of the yellow shed – I don't have a complete photograph.

“Every man should have a shed” the saying goes. Well, I got a shed at the age of twelve when I took over the yellow one in the garden. Did that make me a man?

There I drank my first bottle of John Smith’s Magnet Pale Ale, brazenly bought from the corner shop with my own pocket money in the confidence they would assume I was on a parent’s errand. And there I tried one of my mother’s menthol flavoured Consulate cigarettes and well and truly wished I hadn’t.

Whether these experiments in manliness were as masculine as they seemed at the time I’m not sure. Magnet Pale Ale might have been copiously consumed by Tristan Farnon in the James Herriot books, but it was promoted by the image of a comely young woman with smooth bare legs and shoulders, long ear rings dangling evocatively below blonde Marilyn Monroe curls as she alluringly raises her stemmed glass to declare it “a magnet for me!” Consulate cigarettes, “cool as a mountain stream”, also employed a preponderance of girly social situations, not at all like the manly virility of the Player’s Navy Cut sailor or the Marlboro cowboy, or the self-assured independence of the raincoated, Sinatra-like, “never-alone” Strand character.*

The yellow shed became my own private space. It was my dark-room, games room, chemistry laboratory and music studio. I imagined myself carrying out investigations into original problems, creating new knowledge, an academic in the making. Apart from a few gardening tools, yard brushes and a stepladder, most of the clutter had moved to our new asbestos garage.

Among my old, self-developed 127-sized negatives were two photographs of the inside. Oh what memories!

 

We made a folding bench to go on the end wall. I painted the inside with clean white paint and hung curtains over the window and door. I constructed a cement ridge to stop water pooling under the door. It was icy cold in winter and swelteringly hot in summer. I arranged my great-uncle’s cigarette card collection in their packets along the ledge near the roof. The damp gummed them all together and my mother threw them out.

Pinned to the wall is a map of the East Riding from Flamborough to Spurn, Bridlington to Barnsley, and photographs of singers and pop groups. The large one is The Animals, and although the others are too small to make out, I think The Hollies and The Searchers are among them.  Beneath them, on the ledge above the white ‘meat safe’ cupboard, my half-sized cricket bat lies next to a wooden block drilled with holes to hold pens and pencils.

You can see my ‘new’ bicycle with its straight handlebars, white mudguards and three speed Sturmey Archer gears, and the Philips EL 3541 reel-to-reel tape recorder used to record pop-music from the radio, and to boost my homework grades by recording the series of science programmes we listened to at school.

Chalked around the half-sized dartboard are the words “TRY TO HIT THE BOARD NOT THE WALL”. Impressively, there seem to be no tell-tale dart holes in the woodwork, even on my high resolution image. However, I hope I moved the tape recorder and bare-bulbed table lamp out of harm’s way before throwing any darts. I especially hope I remembered to protect the bottle in the corner just behind the watering can, because this is the hexagonal emerald-green bottle of hydrochloric acid, still three quarters full, mentioned in a previous post.

One can only be appalled by the electrical wiring. It’s a wonder I didn’t electrocute myself or burn the place down. The power supply enters the shed through a hole in the wall above the stepladder – you can just make it out running along the wall outside from the house, above the coal house door in the first picture. At the same end of the shed, a very old fashioned electric fire stands on a couple of wooden blocks nailed to the ledge, its mains cable hanging by a hook. The supply to the tape recorder and table lamp at the other end runs along the roof. There seem to be rather a lot of joins wound round with insulating tape, or perhaps, horrifyingly, sellotape. However, the twisted pair cable along the rear wall, running through a home-made switch box, is merely the lead to the extension loudspeaker fixed above the electric fire – the very same speaker on which my dad listened to Hancock’s Half Hour in the front room in the nineteen fifties.

One warm summer afternoon, the shed door wide open and the extension speaker full on, I switched on the tape recorder, plugged in the microphone, and began to broadcast my own music programme complete with jokes and witty repartee. The Animals, Searchers and Hollies could clearly be heard a dozen or so houses in all directions, up and down the street, across the road, and at the back. Between records came the jokes. “Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?” I was heard to ask, and before my mother could come running out of the house to put a stop to it I provided the answer. “He worked it out with a pencil.” Outrageous in the polite company of the early nineteen-sixties.



* One could write a whole piece about cigarette advertising. One amusing fact is that Marlboro cigarettes were originally marketed for women with slogans such as “Red beauty tips to match your lips and fingertips”, but Philip Morris gave the brand a sex change in 1954 when they began to advertise it as a filter cigarette for men, and introduced the ‘Marlboro Man’ who exuded masculine virility.
 

Le Tour de Yorkshire

In the early nineteen-sixties, I remember going along to Boothferry Bridge to watch The Milk Race pass by – a national cycling event also known as the Tour of Britain, sponsored by the now defunct Milk Marketing Board. Some blokes on racing bikes flashed past amidst the everyday traffic and it was all over in less than a minute. It wasn’t worth the bother. Cycling must be the sport with the biggest disconnect between doing (riding a bike is fun) and watching (tedious). I’ve never been to a cycling event since.

So it’s irritating to find the Tour de Yorkshire imposed on us this weekend, with roads closed most of the day bringing maximum disruption to our activities, just to see people on bicyles for a couple of minutes. I’m keeping well away.

And they call it the / le “Tour de Yorkshire”. What pretentious twaddle! Et le moins dit à propos de la côte de Silsden et de la côte de Wigtwizzle, mieux c'est.*

Surely, if it’s in Yorkshire, shouldn’t it be called t’baiyk race roun’ t ‘roo-ads?

* The less said about “côte de Silsden” and “côte de Wigtwizzle” the better.

In praise of bicycles

“That’s a nice lamp,” the older boy said as he approached me in the dusk at the end of the back lane near the bomb-buildings. I was on my three-wheeler trying out the bright new bicycle lamps I’d been given for my birthday, white at the front, red at the back.

“Can I look?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer reached down and slid the white lamp upwards from its bracket in front of the handlebars. “A really good lamp,” he smiled, examining it closely and seeing how far it could shine, “and a new one too.”

I smiled back gullibly. He glanced around furtively and then ran off along the street, lamp in hand, the beam moving up and down on the wall with the movement of his arm. I watched in disbelief as he disappeared around a corner, and started to cry loudly. My mother came running out of the house and took quite a time to calm me down. I had just been introduced to the world’s wickedness, a crime victim at the age of four. We never saw the lamp again.

“Would you recognize him if you saw him?” she asked. I didn’t know what ‘recognize’ meant.

In the flat streets where I grew up, the roads belonged to bicycles. Everyone had one, and nearly everyone used them, at least some of the time, as their main everyday transport. Four times a day, when the women rode to and from the clothing factory, or the children to and from the schools, or the men to and from the railways, docks and shipyard, they packed the roads three and four abreast - four times a day because most people went home for their ‘dinner’. With no room to overtake, motor vehicles, the few there were, had to crawl along at bicycle speed. When the railway gates closed, cars, vans, lorries, buses, and even motor cycles had to wait patiently behind as many as forty or fifty cyclists who had zig-zagged through to the front of the queue. Who needed a motor vehicle when you could cycle everywhere effortlessly on level roads? Even when it was raining a bicycle cape kept you dry, a shaped waterproof sheet draped over your arms, back and shoulders down to the pedals, with just a hole for your head. Better to be an unfashionable yellow rhinoceros than a soggy wet dog.

My three wheeler came at the start of my bicycling years after graduating from pedal cars. I rode along the pavement at the front of the house, bumping rhythmically over the slabs like a train on a railway track, and returned round the back, past the bomb-buildings, along the smooth concrete surface of the back lane where once a rag and bone man’s horse deposited a stinking pile of manure that kept me away for a couple of weeks until it dried and turned white.

They resurfaced the road at the front, and the loose chippings drifted down the camber to collect in the gutters. I gathered them up in a little tray fixed to the back of my bike, and took them to my mother’s uncle who mixed them with cement to make himself a new front door step. He glanced furtively up and down the street before lifting them inside, the same look as the boy who had stolen my lamp, receiving stolen road stone from a four year old thief. That step is still there after sixty years, as good as the day he built it.

For safety, I ‘helped’ my dad paint white panels on the rear mudguards, just as legally required then on grown up bikes. But my first accident was due to lack of experience rather than lack of visibility. I thought I could reverse my tricycle square against the high wall of the lane and lean back comfortably against it, but the tricycle rolled forwards and I fell backwards cracking my head on the concrete. More crying. My mother came running out of the house horrified by the red pool of blood collecting on the ground. Perhaps a helmet would have saved me, but even if they had been invented then they certainly had not yet been declared ‘essential’ by the health and safety squad.

I moved excitedly up to a two wheeler at around seven or eight, a second hand one. My mother puffed up and down the road behind supporting the saddle, struggling to keep up, and then, in an instant, she was no longer with me, and with a surge of elation I knew I could do it. A year or so later, my dad took me to the cycle shop to order a spanking new bike. That was a good business to be in; there were around half a dozen bicycle sales and repair shops in the town.

My new bike was bigger and fabulously modern, a Raleigh of course. I chose one with the latest straight handlebars rather than the traditional backwards-pointing ones, white mudguards, calliper brakes rather than rods, a front wheel dynamo for the lights, and a three-speed Sturmey Archer rear hub, much simpler to operate than the derailleur gears on racing bikes. You didn’t really need gears on our flat streets except to accelerate quickly and go faster. 

Apart from the usual minor scrapes and grazes I only remember falling off properly on two occasions. The first time, not long after learning to ride, I hit a large stone while following my dad along the river back. My bike stopped dead throwing me forwards over the handlebars, landing on my back in soft grass after a perfect mid-air somersault. I got on my bike again and caught up my dad who had no idea I hadn’t been behind him all the time. The second time was more serious. I stood on the pedals to accelerate, the gear slipped, the pedal gave way and I dropped painfully down on to the crossbar and lost control. I was still moving forwards when my face hit the road, scraping off a strip of skin from chin to forehead, lucky not to break my nose. I looked quite a sight for the next couple of weeks.

No one ever expressed any concerns about young children riding around the streets and lanes on tricycles, or older children around town on two wheelers, nor when we went on longer rides in the school holidays. Around ten miles away was Skipwith Common, the location of R.A.F. Riccall, an abandoned wartime airfield where crews were trained to fly Halifax bombers. Nature was already beginning to reclaim the buildings and runways, and it was a great place to explore. It remains a diverse natural habitat today.

Slightly further was Selby, where the London to Edinburgh railway line crossed the Ouse at the northern end of the station platform, and every train, no matter how important, had to slow down to rattle across the swing bridge at forty miles an hour. A constant procession of powerful main line steam engines with evocative names passed through all day in both directions, enabling me to cross off now long forgotten A4 ‘streaks’ such as ‘Silver King’, A1 Pacifics such as ‘Bongrace’, Britannias such as ‘Rudyard Kipling’, and some of the new English Electric diesels. It was a trainspotters’ paradise.

Skipwith and Selby always seemed much further away on the way home. Around half-way back was a playground in a grassy field, which always provided a much needed rest. If you saw that road now, with its stream of fast cars and heavy lorries, you would be appalled at the idea of eleven and twelve year-olds riding off for the day.

Most of us were thus thoroughly accustomed to busy traffic long before it was decided we needed to take our cycling proficiency tests.* We practised in the army drill hall with long strips of canvas rolled out to represent roads and junctions. I put my new knowledge into use straight away, waiting at the crown of a road to turn right from a minor road into a major road. Unfortunately, it was at the same moment a large lorry wanted to turn right into the road where I was waiting. “The lorry has priority” I told myself confidently, so continued to wait at the crown of the road. The driver wound down his window and told me in no uncertain terms to “get out of the bloody way”. So much for the theory.

As for the practice of being able to control our machines, I suspect we could have taught the instructor a few things. Riding slowly and weaving between cones was simple. We could have shown him the finer skills of carrying two people on one bike and how to look cool while riding along nonchalantly with hands in pockets. Two of my schoolmates could even swap bicycles while riding along without either of them getting off or stopping.

We passed our tests one mild Saturday afternoon in April on the deserted roads of the industrial estate. I proudly received my badge and certificate and quietly went back to my old streetwise ways. But I always maintain that our road-wise experience and natural understanding of things like gears, momentum, acceleration, braking and centrifugal force, gave us a head start when it was time to learn to drive.

In due course my ‘new’ bicycle really became too small for me, but it stayed with me for many years. It saw me through six years in Hull, another pancake flat place. Once when I’d chained it to a bike rack, I returned to find someone had helped themselves to the Sturmey Archer back wheel and had to walk home. I thought of my stolen front lamp from an earlier time. The wheel and hub were surprisingly inexpensive to replace; it always amazes me how cheap bicycle parts are in comparison with car parts of similar complexity.

Not so long ago I took my family to see the place I grew up. At the motorway exit roundabout we stopped to wait for a large middle aged man on a bicycle labouring slowly against the rain and wind, oblivious to the queuing traffic. He was wearing a flat cap and a brown gabardine mackintosh belted over a blue boiler suit, his baggy trouser legs secured at the ankles by bicycle clips. It could have been my dad from sixty years ago. My children laughed out loud at this solitary remnant of the droves of cyclists who used to block the roads four abreast.

“It’s Fungus the Bogeyman,” they shrieked.

“You are now entering my home town,” was all I could think to say.


* Andrew Petcher's Age of Innocence blog has similar recollections of the cycling proficiency test.

Crossbar Excursions

Tasker Dunham on his dad's bicycle crossbar seat

These days, sooner or later, we would have caught the attention of some over-zealous police officer and been fined either for dangerous cycling or for carrying two people on an improperly adapted bike. When there are reports of people being pulled over for carrying children on purpose-built cargo bikes which look like wheelbarrows with pedals, my dad’s primitive crossbar seat would never have made the grade. Not to mention the absence of cycle helmets. No one had ever heard of them then. They would have been ridiculous.

 

Simple no-frills bicycle crossbar seats for children are a bit like effective garden sprays, oil-based paints, wood preserver tablets and non-crepuscular light bulbs – you can’t get them any more. You can buy elaborate crossbar chairs costing an eye-watering hundred pounds or more, with moulded plastic seats, an integral back, a safety belt and bucket-style foot wells, and there are cheaper ones at around twenty pounds, but even they have a back frame and safety strap. What you can't find is a basic crossbar seat like my dad used to have. The health and safety people have made sure of that.

My dad's Heath-Robinson contraption was little more than a padded seat-shaped piece of wood fixed to the crossbar by a pipe-clamp, with a metal bar on the down tube to act as a foot rest. It certainly wasn’t BS EN 14344 compliant, if indeed such a standard had existed in those days, but I sat on it quite safe and happy, hands on the handlebars, fully aware I must not under any circumstances take my feet off the footrests and put them near the front wheel. My main concern, as I saw it, was not to get my fingers nipped by the brake rods which, before cable brakes became ubiquitous, had pincer-like stoppers in front of the handlebars.

“We’re just off out for a blow,” my dad would tell my mother, and away we went. Sometimes it was a couple of miles to a village pub which had seats outside at the back where he brought his pint of beer and some lemonade for me. Next door over a fence were some allotments. He told me how one of them had once been his dad’s, and how they used to grow their own vegetables and work it together as a family on Sunday afternoons and summer evenings before the war. It sounded fun. I wished we had an allotment ourselves.

Sometimes we went to the river bank to watch the ships coming up and going away on the tide. He told me his grandpa used to be a captain, and how sometimes as a boy he went on the train to Hull to join his grandpa’s ship to sail back on the bridge up river to Goole. How wonderful to be able to go on the bridge of a ship with your grandpa as the captain.

On other days we went to the docks to see ships being manoeuvred in or out of the locks, which involved thunderous horns, splashing anchors, creaking fenders, taut ropes, urgent bells and vital shouts. He explained the signals the ships gave to warn other shipping of their intentions: one long blow of the horn for going ahead; three longs for going astern; one long and four shorts for swinging round on the anchor. I was always terrified of the violent turbulence in the water as the locks filled and emptied. You can get hardly anywhere near there now - metal security fencing bars your way.

Further around the river bank were the remains of an old First World War shipyard, where ships had been built for only a few years, but the old decaying jetties and overgrown slipways could still clearly be seen and explored.

There was a place next to the railway line where we watched long trains of coal wagons slowly limp past, or the express ‘fish train’ on its way non-stop to the London markets leaving in its wake a distinctive, lingering, smoky wet fishiness. The luxurious Yorkshire Pullman would pass through with cream and umber coaches all bearing names, with shaded table lamps next to curtained windows. It made a fine contrast to the grubby two-coached local ‘push and pull’ and the shunters from the docks. My dad could identify all the different locomotives: the ‘Austerity’ WD 2-8-0s pulling goods trains, the K3 2-6-0s and B1 4-6-0s on passenger trains, the local 0-4-4 tank engine and the 0-4-0 ‘pugs’. Favourite for us both were the D49 4-4-0s named after counties. He also knew the locomotive headlamp codes – the arrangement of the oil lamps on the front of the engine – which indicated the kind of train it was. A stopping passenger train would have just one central lamp at the top, an express passenger two lamps above the buffers, and the Royal Train, not that we ever saw it, had a unique four lamp headcode.

Another destination was the town cemetery where my dad changed the flowers on his mother’s grave and conducted me on tours of the other family resting places. Great Granddad and Great Grandma Dunham’s white marble plot shone out almost alone where most of its neighbours had either fallen down or never had a headstone in the first place. Even after all this time I could still take you to them all.

Occasionally, we called to see some of the just about still living relatives on the way to wherever we were heading. One lived with his wife in a house by the river, and they always made us cheerfully welcome with orange juice and home made cakes or biscuits.

Another frequent visit was to my dad’s grandpa, the captain, who could often be found on a bench in the garden, a red ensign hoisted to the top of his immaculate white painted flag pole. He had a long radio aerial strung from the top of the pole to the house so he could pick up communications between ships at sea. He had been a hard man at sea, and although now he was more cantankerous than hard, he showed no sympathy when I got my head stuck through the bars at the back of his bench.

One of my dad’s uncles had been a bank manager and lived with his daughter and son-in-law in a large and ostentatiously-named house with fine furnishings. There were no grandchildren, and they obviously disliked having any other dirty children in the house. Even at a young age, I sensed they considered themselves our social superiors.

Another great aunt ruled her household from her armchair like a tyrant, forbidding her retired husband from remaining at home during the day, refusing to countenance “old men sitting around in the house”. He wasn’t bothered. He could sometimes be found in the garden having a crafty smoke and mocking his father-in-law’s red ensign visible a few houses away across the snicket – he always referred to him as ‘old Hindenburg’. Meanwhile, my great aunt did sit around the house with swollen legs while her unmarried son went out to earn the money, and her daughter, whose marriage had broken down under tragic circumstances, cleaned and shopped in skivvying servitude until driven to an early death from heart failure. The house had an oppressive, opprobrious atmosphere, and I was always glad when visiting was over and I could climb back on to my dad’s crossbar and escape.

The sprawling weed-strewn sand pit at the local park, 1954

But our best destination was the local park which, in the days before their removal was necessitated by broken glass, dog dirt and other consequences of negligence, indifference and gratuitous vandalism, had a sprawling, weed-strewn sand pit and sizeable yachting lake. I preferred bucket and spade in the sand, but my dad undoubtedly took me there to sail our toy yacht on the ‘park pond’ as he called it. That was his playtime as much as  mine. He would set the sails, push it off from one side of the lake, and then walk round to collect it at the other. Sometimes it would stay in the middle for ages, blown first one way, then the other, and then become becalmed in the doldrums.

One day the pond had been drained for cleaning leaving only a couple of inches of water. I took off my shoes and socks for a paddle, slipped flat on my back, and we had to go straight home. On another occasion when the water was low, we set a clockwork launch to cross, but it sank in the middle. My dad waded in to get it, the water splish sploshing over the tops of his boots. Back home, he left it on the mantlepiece to dry. The next day, when he was at work, my mother was startled to see a tiny frog watching her from the cabin of the boat. It frightened her so much she had to run for a neighbour to deal with it.

Eventually I learned to ride my own two-wheeler and followed behind, my place on the crossbar seat taken by my brother. It was never the same again.

Belgian Youth Abroad

Tasker Dunham has a narrow escape when Hugo visits Yorkshire

Hugo, my foreign exchange partner, liked to think of himself as the Belgian equivalent of Dick Rivers, the French Elvis Presley. He sang like Dick Rivers, dressed like Dick Rivers and combed his hair like Dick Rivers. Like his role model, he was fascinated by popular American culture. I suspect this was the main reason he wanted to visit England – he thought it was like America. We spoke the same language, English fashion and music were taking over the world, and ‘swinging’ London was the fictional home of Hugo’s other role model, ‘The Saint’, alias “the famous Simon Templar”, played by the debonair Roger Moore, recently syndicated with subtitles on Belgian television. England was much easier to visit than America, and affordable too. The foreign exchange scheme, ‘La Jeunesse Belge à l'Étranger’ (Belgian Youth Abroad), paired up Belgian and English teenagers wanting to visit each others’ countries to stay with each others’ families.

And so, one sunny July afternoon in the early nineteen sixties, Hugo and around thirty other excited Belgian teenagers were on a train travelling north into Yorkshire. As they rattled across the twin bridges over the river and the canal, those who had been in previous years knew they were very near their destination. Meanwhile, waiting expectantly on the station platform, their exchange partners squinted into the glare along the railway line trying to catch a first glimpse of the approaching train. We knew its arrival was imminent having heard the distinctive clatter and thump of the railway gates coming to rest against their stops in the road, and the clunk of signals bouncing into the clear position.

I had been quite apprehensive about Hugo’s visit. Despite having enjoyed my time with his family in Belgium, I was afraid he would find Yorkshire a disappointment. It wasn’t Elvis Presley who had recently performed in our town, or ‘The Saint’ they had filmed for international distribution, it was Wilfred Pickles and his show ‘Have A Go!’ for broadcast on the Light Programme, one of the most old-fashioned and parochially working-class shows on the wireless. I felt sure Hugo was going to be bored and had no idea how we were going to entertain him.

There were no obvious answers among my waiting school group. Nearly all were older; there was hardly anyone from my own cohort, and no one I knew well. From my own year I could see only Wendy Godley, but she hadn’t spoken to me since primary school, not that I talked to girls much anyway. 

The train drew up in a hiss of hot steam, a whiff of coal smoke and a turmoil of slamming doors, waving, cheek-kissing and excited foreign accents. I found Hugo and helped him carry his luggage to our house, oddly distracted by the image of Wendy Godley waiting quietly at the end of the platform with the sun shining through her dress. 

I need not have worried about Hugo’s visit. A big difference between our own trip abroad and Hugo’s to England was that we had been mostly on our own, staying with families all over French-speaking Belgium. Hugo lived near Charleroi and there was no one from home anywhere near me. In contrast, the Belgians came to England as a group of around thirty, all to our small Yorkshire town. At the same time we were hosts to a similar number of German exchange students. So we had thirty Belgian teenagers and thirty German teenagers, many for the first time away from their parents, all in effect on holiday together with their sixty English hosts. It should have been obvious there would be no difficulties in finding things for them to do, they would create their own entertainment. Indeed, Hugo had already been hard at work creating distractions of his own.

“Dzehre was dzees gehrl on dzee trhrain,” he said in his Belgian accent. “Marie-Christine. Vehry byutifurl. She stay ‘ere en England too. She ees frhrom Dinant, but she stay ‘ere weedz an Engleesh gehrl called Wendee. You know whehre she leev?”

That single conversation disclosed Hugo’s main preoccupation for the next two and a half weeks. Whereas in Belgium my activities had depended almost entirely on Hugo and his family, Hugo quickly started to organise things in England for himself. As such a handsome, energetic combination of Dick Rivers and the famous Simon Templar, he was bound to be irresistible to the Belgian girls, the German girls, their English hosts, and all their friends and sisters too. He worked his way through them one by one, sometimes in twos and threes, greatly assisted by the use of my dad’s ancient bicycle which he had commandeered to give himself a level of independence that frequently left me to my own devices. I had never known anyone so unexpectedly overflowing with such extrovert self-confidence; it had certainly not been evident in Belgium, within sight of his parents.“Hugo est un garçon sérieux,” (Hugo is a serious boy) one of his friends had told me.

Most afternoons for two and a half weeks, groups of Belgian and German teenagers, usually but not always with their English hosts, congregated in the park, played tennis or football, wandered around town, visited each others’ houses or drank Coca Cola in coffee bars. Most evenings there were lively parties, a couple of which got seriously out of hand leaving legendary tales of high-spirited behaviour and worse. As Hugo was my ‘wog’, which I am sorry to say is how in those politically incorrect days we referred to our overseas exchange visitors, I got to participate too. Such an intensity of social activity was completely new to me. I had to learn quickly.

One afternoon, Hugo having gone off somewhere with Wendy Godley and Marie-Christine, I found myself on my own in the park with Wendy’s sister, Sandra Godley, who was also ‘vehry byutifurl’, as Hugo put it. While Wendy continued to ignore me, Sandra was completely the opposite. She was always asking me things – things that seemed to mean much more than just the words she used – such as whether I might be going to the pictures. Did I think it cosy at the Carlton? Would I like a ‘Wonderful Life’? Had I thought about ‘A Hard Day’s Night’? Would I enjoy ‘Sex and the Single Girl’? She seemed for ever to be touching me, walking near enough to bump arms, brushing her hand against mine, sitting a bit too close so our knees came into contact.

That day in the park, I was sitting on my bicycle, hands on the brakes, and Sandra stood so closely that, oh so casually and accidentally, her tummy pressed firmly against my fingers. She felt warm through the softness of her strikingly red top. Then, with mischievous blue eyes looking straight into mine in a way that was impossible to refuse, she asked whether she could have a ride, pausing excessively before adding “on your bike, I mean.” I got off, she got on, wobbled a bit because it was too big for her, and then rode off towards the park exit, her ample bottom astride my saddle. I followed on foot, but she had disappeared. To be truthful, I was rather annoyed. If I wanted my bike back, I had to go get it.

I walked the half-mile or so to the Godleys’ house wondering what to say. The front door opened and Sandra waved me inside. She was alone in the house, and had changed out of her red top into what looked to me like a flimsy nightdress. It was hard to know where to look. Even someone as unworldly as me could not fail to gather what she had in mind.

Then, in one of those instants when had I decided to act otherwise the rest of my life could have taken a very different course, I did what newspaper reporters used to say they did after uncovering some lair of wickedness, I made my excuses and left. Actually, ‘made my excuses and fled’ would be more accurate.

There were times during the next few weeks when I wondered how things might have turned out otherwise. It would have been good for me at that stage of my life to have had a very special friend, especially someone so funny and so lovely and so ‘vehry byutifurl’. My brusque behaviour and ensuing coldness must have been hurtful. But this wasn’t ‘swinging’ London – the ‘swinging sixties’ did not reach our part of Yorkshire until at least the nineteen seventies, maybe not even then. We would have become the subjects of the kind of nudges, winks and whispers that circulated round the town for weeks. Out of consideration and loyalty it would have been impossible to pretend nothing had happened.

If these thoughts went through my mind at the time, there was one other thing too. It sounds so terribly arrogant today, in fact it’s shameful, but it illustrates how the tripartite education system, with selection at eleven, divisively changed us. Sandra went to the modern school. Grammar school boys did not go out with modern school girls, not unless they were desperate. Somehow, subconsciously, insidiously, we were turned into pompous snobs, led to think we were better. While modern school boys wanted to beat grammar school boys up, with some justification, modern school girls wanted to catch one. 

I kept quiet about what had happened, but one thing I know for certain. It was a better offer than Dick Rivers had all summer. Girls might have found him attractive and entertaining, but they never tried to pinch my dad’s bike from him.


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Dad's Thursday Helper

“Can I have a puff?” I begged.

I had been ‘helping’ my dad clean his dirty pipes, a regular Thursday afternoon job. He would scrape black burnt ash out of the bowls using a key-like gadget with barbs like a miniature medieval mace, and soak evil-smelling gunge from the stems by poking them through with fluffy white wires he called pipe-cleaners. Then it was time for nicer sounds and smells, wooden matchsticks that rattled in their flat green and red box with a picture of a swan on the top, a firework hiss and the smell of sulphur when he slid them out and struck one, and clouds of sweet St. Bruno smoke. He would pack a pipe bowl with tobacco from a black and white metal tin, put the stem between his teeth, suck a match flame into the bowl, and blow smoke from the side of his mouth with a popping ‘p’ sound, looking very self-satisfied. 

“Let me have a puff,” I asked again. He hesitated. I was only five.

“Oh all right,” he said reluctantly, and held the stem of the pipe near my mouth. I was immediately sick.

Thursday afternoon was my dad’s half day off, when the whole town seemed to close down, and my mother went out to grandma's and left him to his jobs, which I used to ‘help’ him with. We cleaned and brushed his boots and shoes, black ones and brown ones, with Cherry Blossom polish which came in a round metal tin with a bunch of cherries on the lid, and waterproofed the seams with Wren’s dubbin which bore a corresponding little bird on top. We pumped up his bicycle tyres, and mended punctures using bowls of water to see bubbles from the leaks, chalk to mark them, and puncture patches stuck to the inner tubes with stringy rubber solution. We polished the wheels and handlebars with rags and mustard coloured chrome cleaner, transforming them from a dirty grey to a silvery shine, and smeared them in vaseline to protect them from the weather, which seemed to be a magnet for yet more grime. We removed accumulations of oily grit from the chains by soaking them in trays of petrol, then disposed of by setting it alight. At one time my dad just tipped it on the garden, but had to end that practice after Grandpa had been for tea one day and, chewing his salad thoughtfully, had observed that “This lettuce tastes of petrol.” 

Some ‘jobs’ were more for fun than necessary. We had a model live-steam engine with dual pistons driving a flywheel, referred to as ‘the steam-boiler’. It had a small brass water tank heated by a methylated spirit burner that slid underneath. My dad loved to get it out from its oily cardboard box and fire it up on the back room table. Once the steam was up, it could be set in motion. The flywheel revolved at a fair old pace, puffing and rattling, spitting out a lethal mixture of hot oil and boiling water. It had a screeching whistle and a safety valve that blew like a railway engine when the pressure got too high. 

You had to make sure the pistons were always oiled and that the tank did not run out of water, and the spirit burner needed topping up frequently. The smell of hot emulsified oil mixed with methylated spirit is unforgettable. Once, we accidentally spilled methylated spirit on the table and it caught light. I watched fascinated as a lucent blue pool of flame spread slowly across the surface. My dad frantically flapped at the flame with his hands, looking panicky. 

We moved to another house, which brought a whole new set of Thursday afternoon jobs, sanding and painting skirting-boards and staining wooden floors around the edges of carpet squares, before fitted carpets became the norm. We painted the garden shed banana yellow, or perhaps it was a more solid yellow that faded. But there was still room for play-jobs. We found some bits of old lead piping in the shed. Dad melted them in a tin on the gas cooker in the kitchen, and then, holding it with just a pair of pliers, poured the molten metal into moulds made from empty toothpaste tins. It was actually called dentifrice rather than toothpaste, and came in the form of a hard, flat tablet wrapped in red cellophane in a round metal tin. You rubbed it with your wet toothbrush to form a lather. The empty tins were just right for moulding make-believe medals. It was probably a game my dad had played himself in his own childhood. After pouring the lead, he dropped the medals into a bowl of water, where they sizzled as they cooled down. ‘Gibbs’, the name of the toothpaste maker, embossed on the bottom of the tins, transferred perfectly on to the moulded metal medals. No one knew about lead poisoning then. 

The shed leaked, so we mended the roof. I sat up there with my dad, ‘helping’ him tack down new sheets of roofing felt. Then, we painted the felt with hot black tar. It must have been a thoroughly hazardous operation. The things my mother never saw when she left us to our jobs on Thursday afternoons! Again it involved the kitchen cooker. Dad heated the tar to boiling point in an old paint pot, and then, holding it with just a wooden cane through the handle, carried it bubbling and smouldering across the kitchen floor, across the garden, and up on to the shed roof by means of a rickety step ladder. There were splashes of black tar on the yellow paint for years. 

Despite all this, my mother regarded my dad as generally next to useless at practical things. Perhaps it was because she was always out and never knew about the wonderful things he could do with fire, lead, tar, methylated spirits and petrol. Maybe it was just as well that she was. 

More likely, she thought him useless because she was practically so much more capable. She did all the gardening and repairs around the house. She had a naturally constructive, creative imagination that had run through her family for generations. Her great grandfather had worked with steam engines on barges in the 1870s. One of her brothers was a plumber. Another was a self-taught mechanic. I watched the plumber dig down at my grandma’s house to connect a water-toilet to the new drains that had recently reached the village. And later, the mechanic effortlessly dismantled the broken back door lock of my mini-van, and altered the levers so it worked with the ignition key. Even my mother rescued me from a mini-van maintenance disaster with a pointed pair of kitchen scissors after I had stupidly twisted off the top a grease nipple. She could utilise tools in completely different ways to how they were originally intended. 

“Aren’t I lucky to have married such a practical wife” my dad always used to say.

I remember them once painting some gates together, one gate each. My mother got on quickly and efficiently with long smooth brush strokes whilst my dad stabbed awkwardly, making slow progress. She finished hers before he had done half, but he persisted dutifully. You had to look carefully to see that he was using an old brush, the stock clogged up with dried paint, stiff to the point of ineffectiveness, but did not seem to realise anything was wrong.

This kind of thing is pretty insidious. My dad, who made himself a cat’s whisker crystal radio when he was a boy, who taught both me and my brother to assemble Airfix aeroplanes and make things with Meccano, who preserved fences with creosote, who repaired punctured bicycle tyres, who helped maintain his firm’s cars and vans in the 1940s and 1950s, and who had the confidence to melt lead and tar on my mother’s kitchen cooker, and get away with it, gradually came to believe himself functionally incompetent in all matters practical. In fact, we all came to think that. 

After my dad retired he made some real howlers. One day, he decided to help around the house by cleaning the finger marks off the furniture with a mixture of vinegar and water, just like his mother used to do. Within minutes he had knocked over the vinegar water on to the carpet. “For goodness sake, get a bloody job,” my mother shouted.

My mother spent her last months explaining how to do all the household things she had always done for us all. My dad carefully wrote it down in a notebook, but it did not always help. Most memorably, he melted the plastic lid of the kettle which he had forgotten to fill with water before putting it on the gas ring. The next day, having bought a new lid, he did exactly the same again. “Well they always used to have metal lids,” he complained.

Perhaps his ineptitude was a vicious circle, a simple lack of practise leading to a lowering of confidence, or perhaps the early indications really were there in the pool of flaming methylated spirits creeping across the table, and the splashes of tar on the yellow shed.

I like to think I inherited my mother’s practical skills. I can do gardening, decorating, service the car, replace light switches, install software on the computer, put new taps on washbasins, mend toilet cistern float mechanisms and build hutches for guinea pigs, to mention but a few. My dad came one day to find me hammering a hole in the bedroom wall to fit a new electrical socket. The floorboards were up displaying my neat new wiring all ready to connect up. I showed him proudly what I was doing.

“Aren’t you lucky to have married such a practical wife,” he told me.