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Non-Fiction
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| R 'Ouse (I) | |
| By Bagheera | ||||||||||||||||||
| 09 May 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||
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Something I sat and watched appear on my PC screen, almost by magic. Gerald C mentioned the theoretical monkey(s) tapping out the "Compleat workes off Shakkespeere" if given sufficient time .... I almost felt as if I was in their copy-typing pool..... This is my submission for the "Childhood" topic for June: enjoy!! R ’Ouse – Part I “ ……… in the middle of R Street” The lyrics to this Madness hit (from many years ago) always sounded to me as if at least one of the group – presumably the person responsible for the lyrics – ought to have been from the part of Liverpool in which I grew up. The Fifties seem impossibly long ago now. Although I have lived in many places around the world, I made the decision a few years ago to ‘return to my roots’: the phrase was popular at the time, and had a certain attraction to it. I grew up in a ‘Corpy’ back-to-back terrace. There was a back (or ‘living’) room, and front (or ‘posh’) room for weddings & funerals. The kitchen was a single, flat-roofed “add-on” taking up perhaps half of the rear yard. It was almost as if it had been hurriedly added on to the original structure at the last moment, having been forgotten in the original architect plans. And, of course, at the bottom of the yard was the khazi. Indoor toilets were still at least a dozen years into the future, and as for running hot water ….. !! Although we lived in the ’burbs (and had probably more than our ‘fair share’ of the “leafy” variety in the form of nearby public parks) the city had taken an awful pasting during WWII. Mains electricity was not installed in Old Swan until some time in the latter half of the decade. The “knocker-up” (officially employed by the Corpy to light and douse the gas street lamps each day) was there for workers who had no alarm clock. The main thoroughfare which (for the pedant) still today defines one ‘boundary’ of Old Swan carries most of the eastbound traffic heading for St. Helens and other towns. It is no wider (and no narrower) than it was fifty years ago, but looking at today’s traffic I wonder how buses and motorists coped when there were two sets of tramlines down the centre of the road, and all other traffic was restricted to single line flow. For that matter, I also wonder how pedestrians managed to cross Prescot Road without taking their lives in their hands. When the decision was made to replace the tram network with buses, the 10 route along Prescot Road was not the very last route to operate in service, but it was pretty close. Today, the 10 bus to St. Helens follows the exact same route the tram used. The trams themselves always seemed to be on their last legs – MOT certificates were still a futuristic pipedream in some bureaucrat’s fevered imagination – but they got there, and no passenger ever got killed (as far as I know). Two-man operation (driver & guard) meant that there was no nonsense from kids (we behaved ourselves, honest we did!) or drunks. The latter were prevented from boarding, quite possibly receiving a kick up the backside – and more than likely assistance from one or more passengers, if the guard asked for it. They also ran on time. At certain points along the route the driver had to get out and stamp a Timecard, which showed where he was, and at what time. There were severe penalties for poor timekeeping, and God help a driver who left a Timing point early. He was deemed to have failed to extend “minimum courtesy” to a passenger who might be relying on the tram being exactly on time ….. ! In Fifties’ Liverpool Public Transport was the rule, not the exception. Few had the money to buy a car outright, and the ‘never-never’ wasn’t an option for such a major expenditure. Trams (and, later, buses) were generally full and there was always another one either already in sight or arriving soon if you were unlucky enough to be ‘bounced off’ a full tram/bus during rush hour. But what goes around, comes around. Sometimes, fashions can even change so rapidly that they’re back “in” before you even realise they were in fact “out”. Recently it was revealed that when the tram network was replaced by the buses, many of the tracks were simply tarmac’ed over, they were never removed. Now Liverpool is to be Capital of Culture in 2008, one tendered proposal is based upon strimming off the tarmac back down to the old tracks, and building a tram network on them! I, of course, was one of the ‘privileged’ in that I lived on the ‘Swanite’ side of Prescot Road. The ‘poor relations’ on the “other side” were not real ‘Swanites’. They lived in an area we “real” Swanites called either Broadgreen, or Knotty Ash, or even (shudder!!!) Stoneycroft. Coincidentally, I was there today visiting, and saw the same phenomenon I recall distinctly from childhood. The Old Swan (or southern) side of Prescot Road was bathed in bright sunshine: the poor sods on the other side had brollies out, as it was p********g down barely – what?? – ten metres away, on the other side of the road! Nobody ever told us kids who owned them, where they were stashed when they weren’t in use, or who provided what went on them. But a line of trestle tables covered with decorated paper tablecloths and an appropriate number of folding chairs seemed to appear with clockwork regularity down the centre of the street. Half the time, I don’t think we were actually told why we were having a Street Party (and the rest of the time, if we were told, we probably didn’t care!!) But someone (or to be more exact, someone’s Mum!) must have made all the jellies, buttered and cut the bread, spread the fish-paste (or whatever could be eked out of the Food Stamp ration books which we were still using), and somehow organised the lemonades, cordial and a hundred other things (including loaned 78s and somebody’s wind-up gramophone to play them on). No electricity = no TV = make your own entertainment on wet days when you can’t go out and play! But when it rained, it seemed, then it poured! Standing at the front door it was common to see the roadway completely covered and the drains unable to cope. Many times the water level reached and even rose above the 3 inches or so height difference between the road itself and the pedestrian footpath. There was a slight but significant slope from the local bakery at the top of the street down towards the ‘boundary of our realm’, the aforementioned Prescot Road. In heavy rain it quickly became a river, carrying all sorts of interesting flotsam past the windows of our house: lollipop sticks, of course, and the occasional sweet wrapper, but mostly twigs, dried grass and other natural detritus. Litter, like graffiti, was something else. Everyone knew what it was, but few of us had any personal experience of it (unless you count the ubiquitous “Kilroy wos ’ere” pictures, which were usually done in the very temporary medium of a scrap of chalk stolen from the classroom) The local bakery is long gone, and the Funeral Directors which was immediately next door. When I now think of how today’s youth would regard the “Ultimate Dare” of the Fifties, which was to trespass (shock!! horror!!) on the waste land which adjoined the garage Cubbons Bakers used for their delivery vans. The ground was, I assume, earmarked for expansion plans which were never realised, but when the gates of the grounds were briefly unlocked for a short while late in the afternoon it was almost a “point of honour” to be able to slip unnoticed past the caretaker/groundsman, and remain hidden in the long grass and bushes until the gates were locked again and you had to ‘prove’ your success by climbing out over the wall. This was too smooth to scale from the outside, but it was possible to climb on the rougher inner surface ….. A more ‘legitimate’ play area was the childrens’ park opposite Cubbons at the top of the street. Part tarmac’ed, part grassy area, it had the standard sets of swings, slides, maypole, monkey-ladder, and something we always referred to as the “Shaddle”. I have never seen this ride anywhere else, although I’m sure it wasn’t unique to Old Swan. It consisted of a long bench, with room for about 4 seated passengers, which swung through its long axis propelled by the exertions of two who stood at either end and bent their knees/pulled with their arms until the established rhythm got the ‘ship’ moving pendulum-fashion backwards and forwards. The one item of equipment I have not mentioned is one we kids didn’t use at all: this was the “Cockywatchman’s Hut” This was invariably staffed by an OAP (quite possibly a ‘walking wounded’ WWII soldier unable to perform more physically demanding work) who was responsible for opening up and locking away each day, and (at least in theory) responsible for safety while the playground was open. Cruel as children can be, “Goin’ fer a Razz” – cheeking the Cockywatchman until he gave chase – was another common childhood activity. How tame it all seems by comparison now! Every era has its individuals, characters, unique persons who leave an indelible mark on the memory. Many will have heard of Seth Davy, immortalised in song by amongst others The Spinners (the Liverpool folk group, not the American ‘soul’ combo). Seth was a real person who performed a puppet show for children in Liverpool centre in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But there were others …… All the terraced houses in all the streets were much the same, both inside and out, But what the individual tenant did with the property was vastly different from one house to another. Despite the not-specially-grand dimensions of each rear yard, the bloke who lived nearest to the childrens’ playarea at the top of the street had managed to install individual lofts for his flock of about 20 racing pigeons. They must have earned him money, as I remember him being the first bloke in the street to own a car, which he claimed he’d paid cash for out of his winnings. I wish I could remember his name. He became something of a local hero, briefly, when he saw someone attempting to break into a neighbour’s house during the night. He pulled a catch (from his bedroom) which released the pigeons from their lofts. The would-be burglar was startled, fell, and broke his leg. Of course, this meant he had no opportunity of escaping before the long arm of the law arrived to take him into custody …. At the other end of the street lived Joey Ford, the local coalman. He didn’t actually turn his yard into a coal depot – there are after all practical limitations to how much you can cram into any given space, unless of course you’re a Time Lord and knowledgeable about Tardis technology! However, he did manage to set his yard up so that he could stable his carthorse there each night, as he preferred to look after it himself rather than entrust it to somebody else. He did eventually move on to motorised transport when the horse died of natural causes, but his heart was no longer in it and he soon sold the business and retired. The other bloke whose name nobody ever knew might or might not have lived locally. He turned up at irregular intervals, but generally about once a fortnight, and his call “Rag – bone!” was generally a signal for us to pester Mum/Gran/Auntie to find something for the (Government-sponsored) recycling drive. Not, I hasten to add, because of our ecological stance on such matters, but because the Rag – Bone Man was always good for a balloon, whistle or some other similar ‘tat’ in exchange for what we could find to hand over. “Wake up there, lah, the Knocker-up sleeps light: Dawn taps yer winder, ends annuther night … ” (from “The Rubiyat of Stan Kelly”) Yes, there was such a person, and his role was an extremely important one around many Liverpool districts in the years immediately post-WW2. Most if not all of the adults would have known his name, but for us kids he was someone we might see occasionally lighting the street gas lamps if we were out later than we ought to be in the evenings. His job had to be the dictionary definition of a ‘split shift’, in many ways. The first half of his round was done at twilight (which obviously changed with the seasons). He was then back at the ‘depot’ for a number of hours until it was time to go out again and turn all the lamps off again: and it was during the latter half of this duty that his (in many peoples’ eyes, far more important) function came into play. Those lucky enough to have a job were often obliged to rise very early in the morning, to get early morning buses or trams (or walk) to where they worked. But even they were unlikely to have the cash to spend on luxuries such as alarm clocks, so the “Knocker-Up” performed a vital service for many of them. His skill lay in remembering who to wake, and when: then he had to pitch his voice “just so” – loud enough to rouse his ‘client’ without disturbing a neighbour. Electric street lighting (and automatic timers) meant that this important figure disappeared quietly from the scene, but by that time mass-production and the consequent affordability of accurate timepieces had already ensured that everybody who needed an alarm clock could buy one.
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