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On ...
Childhood stuff
The house on Beechwood Crescent was a posh house, that is to say it was posh for Burley, that is to say it was, along with its identical twin next door, the only semi-detached house for streets around.
28 Beechwood Crescent sat on a small, awkward corner triangle plot of land, a brick built semi-detached residence of 1920-ish vintage, deposited almost as an afterthought on the bit of land that was left after the developer had built his row upon row of back-to-back terraced houses that made up 99% of the housing stock of Burley and in particular the streets named the “Lumley’s” and “Beechwoods” which stretched in parallel lines down the hill from the Headingley rugby ground towards Burley Road, Kirkstall Road, and inner city Leeds.
Because we lived at 28 Beechwood Crescent and because our friends all lived in the tiny back-to-back houses in the same street, we were regarded as posh, we had a big house with two entrance doors, one at the front and one at the back so that you could walk right through the house, which was an impossibility in the back-to-back houses over the road where you only had a front door and the back wall of your front room was also the back wall of the front room of the house in the next street behind, and even though our house only had two bedrooms, at least me and my brother Ned had half a bedroom each, some of our friends had to share bedrooms with several other siblings.
We were also regarded as posh because as a requirement of his job as a service engineer our dad had a company car, a brand new Austin A40 which was the height of vehicle technology in 1963, red with a black roof it was and I remember the men in the street walking up to our house just to look at the A40 and marvel at how short its gearstick was, how innovative the daring new shape with its cut-off rear and fold-down boot lid (it was the worlds first hatchback design), why even the back seats could be folded down to make more boot space, the men of the street would stand around gazing in wonder at the small car, sharing their Gold Leaf and Players cigarettes, sitting in the drivers seat and playing with the gear stick, flicking the light switches on and off “eeeh, fingertip control Frank”, “aye, its got a blinker switch right there on the steering column look”, the Austin A40 was so radically different from its Austin predecessors that it quickly became an object of desire amongst the whole of the male population in our street to the extent that they would ask our dad how the car was running on a nightly basis as if it were a thoroughbred racehorse, they all but came and tucked it in every night, it was a lovely car.
I only remember three other cars residing in our street, car ownership was still the height of poshness and the working class community of Burley relied on public transport or their own legs to get about their business, even Laurie Jermaine over the road who was an HGV driver did not have a vehicle of his own, he had to catch the bus to his employers yard to collect his wagon every morning, and catch the bus home late at night when his work was done – or not at all as the case may be, Mr Jermaine seemed to be out of work more often than in it, maybe he was a bad driver, or maybe he just didn’t like the work, but with six kids and two adults in a small two bedroom back-to-back house, money was always going to be tight whether or not you were in regular work, and Laurie Jermaine’s work was anything but regular.
Our dads first task when we moved into Beechwood Crescent was to build a garage for his car, and one of my earliest memories from Beechwood Crescent was of me playing in a massive mound of sand that he’d had delivered for the hours of cement mixing that he undertook to erect his fine garage. There must have been several tons of sand in the mound that was dumped into our small front yard and to stop it spreading itself all over the place, our dad built a fence around the mound out of old scaffold planks then laid plywood panels over the top of it to stop it getting soaked in the rain, and to stop the local cats from shitting in it, such mounds of sand being great attractions to cats for whom one of lifes greatest pleasures is shitting in sand then burying it.
Unfortunately sheets of plywood are no barrier for a young five year old who wants to play in an mountain of sand with his toy soldiers and cars and I always manage to prise a gap in the defences then sit in the hole that I’d dig out and play all day. Of course the local cats would find the same hole and perform their ablutions in the same sand hole for me to dig up the next day, or worse still, for our dad to mix in with his cement the next evening.
Months and months of a couple of hours graft every evening and most weekends culminated in a functional garage of just the right dimensions for the small Austin A40, built from cement rendered breeze blocks with hand made wooden doors and to top off the masterpiece at the back of the garage, three windows which were glazed with etched glass. Our uncle being a printer by trade had happened upon some glass panels that his company had been commissioned to print with emblems to British industry, fine pictures of steel and coal workers, printmakers and builders, our garage became a shrine dedicated to the British working man, and all because our uncle had made a mistake and printed the panels slightly off centre, then somehow they had fallen into his car and found their way to our new garage where three empty window frames awaited them. After installation people would walk past the back of our garage and stop and point out the various industries depicted and marvel at how someone would go to all the trouble of etching his garage windows like that, and for why.
But after the garage was finished the mound of sand had hardly shifted, he’d obviously over-estimated the amount needed by a factor of around ten and so for many more months I had a fantastic playground until one day the hole that I’d dug collapsed in on me while I was sitting in it, burying me up to the chest and my wailing and screaming finally attracted the attention of our mother who was not best pleased, either at me or our dad who was instructed to immediately dispose of the mountain playground.
Our dads answer was to set upon an even greater task than the garage, inspired by the ancient Great Wall of China, that monument to human ingenuity and labour that was erected to keep out the Mongol hordes in 700Bc (or so) and which is the only man-made structure to be visible from space, our dad decided to build a five foot high rendered breeze block wall all the way around his property, partly to use up the sand, partly to keep us kids in the garden, and partly to get him out of the house and out of ear-bending range every evening.
As already mentioned, the house was on a triangular piece of land with the house and new garage on the base of the triangle, the garden stretching to a thin point approximately 30 yards away, its simple maths to calculate that the wall would be at least 70 yards long, with two gateways and reinforcing pillars every five yards or so, it kept him busy for the rest of the year and was duly christened Franks Great Wall of Burley when completed, in fact a few years later we had confirmation from one of the early Apollo missions that not only could they see the Great Wall of China from their capsule out in space, but Franks Great Wall of Burley was also clearly visible. Forty years later it still stands albeit at an occasional jaunty angle where he obviously mixed the foundation cement a little thinner than usual, or more likely, where the cat shit interfered with the foundation setting time.
Beechwood Crescent was the main arterial road from our part of Burley up the hill to Headingley and our house was built on a wide sweep of a bend as the Crescent wound around our house and started its ascent past the Lumley allotments towards the Headingley rugby ground, our address was given as Beechwood Crescent for the only reason that the front door of the house was there, but as a child I can never remember using the front door, only the back door which faced onto a small yard and the narrow cobbled street that was Beechwood Place.
Beechwood Place was where we grew up, the Crescent was too busy to play on and anyway it had been tarmaced and was no fun, the side streets that led off the Crescent were packed full of small terraced houses and were still cobbled, providing whole afternoons of fun to us kids in the summer when the sun would melt the tar in between the stone cobbles, sending it bubbling up where we would twist it around sticks and use it to flick at each other or make intricate models of god-knows-what before flicking them at each other, many is the time that I have returned to our back door and into the kitchen to be belted by my mother for having tar all over my hands, face and worse of all clothes, especially the hand knitted woollen jumpers that our mother would constantly knit for us – can you imagine trying to prise tar balls out of a woollen jumper after your kids had been sent to bed early ? Such is a mothers love.
Directly opposite our back door was the Jermaines house, crammed full of so many kids that I’m still not sure just how many there were, I do know that two of them, Paul and Nigel were the same age as me and my brother Ned, so we spent a lot of time flicking tar at each other, but their other siblings were to numerous to recall and younger too, so they didn’t count.
Next door to the Jermaines heaving, bursting at the seams terrace house lived a witch, or at least that’s what Paul and Nigel told us, “that old women next door is a witch” they’d whisper to us in conspiring voices, “she’s already eaten three of our sisters” and we believed them because she looked like a proper witch, old, haggared and bent almost double, dressed exclusively in black, her terrace house had a flight of steps leading up to the front door which was sheltered by an open porch, the only one in the street which was, and just to add to the witches house effect the porch had fancy gingerbread-style decorations around it, all painted black.
The witches house was always dark, she never switched any lights on inside even at night, Paul and Nigel told us it was because witches can see in the dark so it must have been true. The poor old cow must have wondered how the hell she had come to live out her meagre existence in a street where all the kids screamed and ran away whenever she came and stood out on her front porch.
Each of the short streets of the Beechwoods ran across the face of the hill, linking Beechwood Crescent to Lumley Avenue which also climbed up the hill to the Lumley allotments. Linking Beechwood Crescent and Lumley Avenue was a succession of parallel identical streets, Beechwood View, Terrace and Mount and finally at the top of the hill Lumley Road, where our cousins lived. Within these four blocks of streets was our whole world, 200 or so identical terrace houses, all with dark, damp cellars, a small front yard, one main bedroom and another in the roofspace, fortunately for the residents the area had been developed shortly after the start of the 20th century so all of the houses had indoor toilets, unlike some of the earlier streets further down into Burley where a toilet block was shared by every six houses, back-to-back houses obviously didn’t have back yards to put outside privvys in.
At the end of each of these streets was a corner shop with accommodation above, each corner shop having been occupied by the same family since inception. Our street corner shop was a greengrocers where the women of the neighbourhood would gather for a whole day sometimes, gossiping whilst purchasing a pound of spuds or carrots for their husbands tea, they’d buy their greengroceries there then stroll up the hill to the next street end and purchase their firelighters from the grocers, then onwards to the off licence for a bottle of stout, shopping was so much easier then, the shops were all so small but conveniently placed at your street ends, you never had to walk far for a butchers or a bakers, and yet the women of the neighbourhood, especially on fine days, could go out of the house in the morning with a shopping list of five items and still not have returned home by coming-home-from-school time at 3pm, we knew where they were, we could see them still gossiping at the end of our street having got no further than our greengrocers since this morning, but you didn’t dare interrupt your mum when she was having a good gossip with three other women.
Our greengrocer corner shop owner would spend the first hour or so every day arranging the display of his produce on the pavement outside the shop door, crates of apples and oranges, carrots, potatoes, and when in season Swedes, turnips and parsnips, all turned towards the road so that the housewifes could poke and prod them as they passed before deciding whether or not to splash out on a pound or so of King Edwards today.
It was inside the shop though that I remember most of all, it smelled permanently of root vegetables, a not-unpleasant earthy, rooty smell, tinged occasionally by some fruit that had gone off before he could sell them, which in all honesty wasn’t very often, partly because he didn’t carry much more stock then the average home would nowadays, but mainly because housewifes made a career out of spotting soft apples or potatoes that were “on the turn” so that they could bargain a few pennies off the price.
As a kid the best bit of the shop was the row of large tin boxes that were arranged along the front of the counter, each with a glass lid and in each a different type of biscuit, arrowroot, digestive, custard cream, or best of all, fig rolls. Of course biscuits should have been in the grocers shop and no doubt the “proper” grocer three street-ends away would curse him in bed every night for encroaching on his trade but our greengrocer didn’t seem to care.
I seem to recall him being a real tight old sod though, highlighted every bonfire night when at every street-end there would be a bonfire and our greengrocer would stagger up the street with a sack of old spuds on his back for roasting on the fire with the occasional bag of chestnuts as well, he’d then wait until everyone had eaten their fill before suggesting a whip round might be in order to pay for his losses, strangely enough everyone would then complain of how their spuds had been green inside and not worth eating at all, not that it had stopped them while they still thought they were for free.
Occasionally in the shop the greengrocer would leave one of the glass lids off the biscuit barrels and if we noticed then it was incumbent on us kids to stage a raid on the shop to snaffle some biscuits off him, one of us would go and ask our mothers if they wanted an errand running and pester enough so that she’d give us a few pence for some Bisto or a couple of apples, then in the shop the one with the genuine errand would try to keep the shopkeeper distracted enough while the others slowly shuffled over to the open biscuit tin and stood there for a short while before slyly bending their knees with their arms dangling loosely at their sides until contact was made inside the barrel with a biscuit of some description, they’d then slowly stand back to attention and slip the snaffled treats into a trouser pocket, all the while keeping a sweet innocent smile on your face, Nigel Jermaine was the best at doing this and his snaffled fig rolls were the best I’ve ever tasted, we’d run around the corner into the next street to share them out as it would be a disaster to go through the whole snaffling procedure only to be spotted eating biscuits in your own street by your mother, and make no mistake about it, she’d spot you and she’d know straight away that they weren’t her biscuits.
The daily shopping routine for the housewifes was cast in stone and was not to be altered or interrupted, and for good reason, nothing was pre-packed, measured, or vacuum sealed for freshness, everything had to be bought on or about the day that it was to be eaten and everything had to be carried home in the one big shopping bag that every mother had, great big leather shopping bags that had been handed down from mother to daughter, great big shabby, well sought into double handled bags into which was tipped every type of produce that they needed for that day.
So for instance if your mother needed five pounds of potatoes, some onions, eggs, a loaf of bread and a cream cake or some other sort of fancy for “afters” then she had to plan the shopping trip carefully. The greengrocer would be first on the list and he would weigh out the five pound of potatoes on his huge pan scales before asking her to open the shabby old shopping bag and tipping the potatoes into it, remember, no bags, no pre-packed plastic shrink-wrapping, all of your goods went straight into the bag. The onions would follow straight on top of the potatoes, payment would be made, a tasty bit of gossip exchanged and on to the bakers for the bread and cream cake which would be balanced precariously on top of the potatoes and onions, a bit more gossip, and then perhaps some more gossip in the street with that lady from Lumley Avenue that your mother didn’t really know but met every day doing the shopping rounds, then finally pop into the grocers on the way back down the hill to pay into the Christmas club and purchase, then place the eggs every so carefully alongside the cream cake and bread, the whole trip would involve walking no further than three or four streets and would take most of the morning, or on a fine day when you could stop for longer and chat on their doorsteps with nearly every other housewife on the route, the trip could take all day, with invites into several houses for cups of tea and a bun.
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