Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  Ilkley itself lies immediately below the moor. At its heart is Brook Street, the main north–south thoroughfare, lined with shops. It has a flower-filled traffic island at the top. I used to help plant it up with geraniums in summer and wallflowers in autumn. The traffic doesn’t go very fast in Brook Street; it can’t because there are always dozens of people trying to cross. It’s only a couple of hundred yards long, and the brook runs beneath it now, channelled from its exit from the moor until it relieves itself into the Wharfe just by the riverside toilets. As kids, we used to stand above the rusty metal grid that marked the beck’s outfall into the river, wondering if it really was the water that had come from the moor or the water that had come from … somewhere else entirely.

  ‘They must be bloody big fish in this part of the river,’ mused Mickey Hudson.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Stands to reason. All that stuff coming out of the bog. They must be bloody enormous.’ I try not to feel uneasy when I eat local trout.

  Out the Back

  Our back garden wasn’t the most well-endowed nature reserve, but at least it was handy. The patch of ground at the top of the four old stone steps was, I suppose, about fifteen feet by forty feet. There was an old sycamore tree at the far end, deformed by years of careless pruning, and below it, on the rusted wire netting, ‘Dorothy Perkins’ did her best to brighten up the month of June.

  A narrow border ran round the patch of threadbare grass that had been allowed to take over what once was a vegetable patch. For six or seven years Brussels sprouts and a few potatoes grew in the dusty black earth, until my dad lost the inclination to grow his own, and the Brussels lost the will to live. Only a hydrangea provided some kind of deliberate ornament; the ‘Esther Read’ daisies and the montbretia weren’t so much deliberate as persistent – planted there by some Victorian gardener, they had now dug in their heels and refused to budge.

  ‘Can I have a bit?’ I asked.

  ‘Which bit do you want?’ asked Mum, whose preserve the garden had now become.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I just want to sow some seeds.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to look after it, mind. I don’t want you forgetting all about it, because I know what’ll happen – I’ll end up doing it.’

  I didn’t forget all about it. But my dad did. I was given a patch about three feet square. I forked it over and raked it flat, then I went to Woolworth’s and looked at the packets of seeds – Cuthbert’s and Bees. Somehow Cuthbert’s seemed a puny sort of brand name, so I plumped for the more reliable-sounding Bees. I chose a single packet of bright-coloured Livingstone daisies; took them home, sprinkled them on the patch and raked them in. I stuck an old wooden lollipop stick through the bottom of the empty packet, and pushed it in alongside my very first seedbed, like the pictures I’d seen in Beatrix Potter books. An obliging shower of rain resulted in early germination, and I went out to admire my new clutch of seedlings. Perfect. Shimmering in green and crimson, with little sparkly silver bits all over tiny leaves.

  I went out to look at them every day for a week. By Saturday a gust of wind had taken away the packet that marked the spot, and the seedlings now looked quite different: they had a boot print in the middle of them. The Livingstone daisies around the outside of the boot print grew well, and eventually covered up the bare patch in the centre where my dad had stepped on what he thought was bare earth.

  The liking for plants grew out of a love of nature in general. Every March I’d go up to the tarn on the edge of the moor and fish out some frog spawn. It would live in a jam jar on the windowsill, and I’d watch the sago pudding dotted with full stops that turned first into commas, and then into tiny black tadpoles with gills like miniature antlers.

  Soon they would outgrow the jam jar and have to be moved into a goldfish bowl, where they would grow little legs and their tails would slowly shrink.

  ‘They need to eat, you know,’ cautioned Mum.

  ‘What do they eat? Goldfish food?’ I knew its value. Our two goldfish, Stripey and Peter, lived well into their twenties on one pinch of fish food a week and a once-yearly clean-out. People made the mistake, said my mother, of feeding them too much and cleaning them out too often. While the eventual age of our goldfish did, to some extent, vindicate her claim, it would have been nice to have seen a bit more of them through clearer water.

  ‘No. Tadpoles don’t eat fish food. You need to give them meat.’

  I looked at the tiny black blobs with their wriggling tails. They did not look like carnivores.

  ‘Hang on.’ Mum went to the kitchen worktop and cut a tiny cube of meat from the chunks she was cutting up for stew.

  ‘I read it somewhere. You’ve got to tie this to a piece of cotton and hang it over the side of the bowl so that it dangles in the water.’

  And that’s what I did. The tadpoles seemed only vaguely interested, but then there was no sign of any teeth. I couldn’t work out how they could draw from it any kind of sustenance. And yet they grew. The question was, what to do with them next?

  In the early years we would take them back to the tarn when they had clearly outgrown the house. But when Mum and Dad bought the TV in 1958, I discovered a programme called Out of Doors. Once a week, in Children’s Hour, it looked at what was happening in the outside world at that particular time of year. It was a nature diary, aimed at interesting the young in what went on all around them.

  The series gave rise to a book in 1959, and on page 56, in the section devoted to April, was a small article by a man called Leslie Jackman on ‘Making a Vivarium’.

  ‘Da-a-ad?’

  ‘Yes?’ He spoke from behind his Daily Express, as usual.

  ‘Will you make me a vivarium?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A vivarium. It’s for keeping frogs in. Look …’

  I offered him the book, and he read, as I did, the opening sentence: ‘This is the month when you will almost certainly want to keep a few frogs or toads, so why not make a small vivarium.’

  He sighed, said, ‘Mmm,’ and went back to his paper.

  I read on: ‘All you need is a wooden box from the grocer’s. Knock out one side and nail on an edging of wood measuring one inch by one inch. This will form a surface on which to bed the glass front.’

  It all seemed very complicated. I could probably get the wooden box from Mickey Hudson’s dad, and we had old broken panes of glass stacked behind the midden, but I’d probably break the glass if I tried to make it fit the box. I read on and dreamed … ‘A two-inch layer of garden soil mixed with peat … a small glass or earthenware bowl to act as a pond … Visit a nearby marsh or river and dig up a few roots of rush, sedge, water mint and other waterside plants … and so turn it into a home for frogs.’

  Dad continued to read his paper, but the following day when I came home from school, there was a vivarium sitting in the backyard – freshly made from a wooden box, with a glass front and even a sliding glass roof. I did like my dad.

  He was never overly demonstrative when it came to outward signs of affection towards me – apart from the ruffling of my hair when I sat on the floor in front of his chair to watch telly. He gave me a peck on the cheek to say goodnight when I was little, but that faded out before I achieved double figures. I suppose that like most northern men he was wary of turning his lad into ‘a bit of a nancy’. But he showed his affection in other ways – mainly with his ability to make things. Before the vivarium, Father Christmas had brought me the garage for the Dinky toys, the fort with the dozen lead soldiers and the zoo with the lions and tigers and giraffes. The zoo was his pièce de résistance – it was made of wood, painted red and yellow and had sliding panels at the back to put the animals in their cages – cages that had real metal bars. It measured about two feet square, with half a dozen cages, and was presided over by a big, fat zookeeper with a top hat and a walking stick.

  Dad spent a lot of time in the cellar on November and December evenings. At that time of year it was pla
ced out of bounds to us children. We never realised why. Nor why it was suddenly OK for us to go down there and bring the coal up again on Christmas morning. Wafting up the cellar steps would be the smell of newly sawn timber as well as coal, and a neat pile of wood shavings and sawdust would be heaped in a corner. And still we never rumbled.

  He would watch as I discovered the fort or the zoo or the garage in front of the fireplace on Christmas morning. ‘Is it all right, Algy?’ he’d ask, his eyes glowing every bit as brightly as my own.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ was about as much as I could manage, hardly able to believe I had something so special. I must have known they were homemade, and yet I cannot recall ever thanking him in person. Only saying thank you to Santa, as my mother insisted. Perhaps the ‘game’ was such a tradition that it would have been unkind to have suggested that the toys came from Dad and not from Father Christmas. Perhaps it was to protect my sister – almost five years younger – from the truth. I cannot remember; all I know is that in my heart I felt deep gratitude towards my father.

  The homemade toys and carts and vivariums were his way of ‘doing his bit’ for his children. Money might be in short supply, but he had his hands and the ability to work with them, and then my mother would step in when it came to the more artistic finishing touches – curtains for Kath’s doll’s house or covers for the pram.

  For the vivarium, Mum had found a cut-glass sugar bowl she didn’t use (never had frogs such a high-class pond) and an hour down by the river yielded the water plants they spoke of on Out of Doors.

  Every year from then on we had baby frogs in the vivarium, each and every one of them called Gladys. It was Mum’s idea. I just went along with it.

  If tadpoles and frogs occupied the early part of the year, then other forms of nature took over in summer. Birds in particular. My constructional skills did stretch as far as making a bird table – from the bottom of an old doll’s house that had fallen apart. All it took was one nail to fasten it to the end of a broom handle, and a large hammer to knock it into a soft piece of ground. On top of it, I piled stale bread and handfuls of Swoop wild bird food that I’d persuaded Mum to buy from the pet shop. I even joined something called the Swoopers’ Club by sending off a competition form on the back of the packet. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure I’d got all the answers right. Did a blackbird run, jump or hop? Did robins eat insects or seeds? To make sure, I filled in several forms and became, as a result, a Swooper four times over.

  To ascertain the truth about the blackbird, I watched carefully from the kitchen window when our local one came down to feed. But we were too far away. The garden was beyond the back and I couldn’t tell with confidence the precise gait of the distant bird.

  So I devised a cunning plan. Armed with a handful of Swoop and an old blackout curtain that my mother now used as a dust sheet when she was decorating, I ventured into the garden one sunny morning in the school holidays.

  I scattered the handful of seed on the lawn, then settled down under the big black curtain barely three feet away from it, peering out through a hole. I waited and waited. For ten minutes nothing happened, but my patience was rewarded and I saw the blackbird run, then jump towards the seed. It might even have given a small hop for good measure. The question remained unanswered, but the pleasure of watching wildlife at close quarters amply repaid the discomfort I suffered from the heat of the summer sun under a big black shroud of cloth.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Cookie would ask, peering through our kitchen window while she sat on a buffet and drank her elevenses with my mum.

  ‘Birdwatching.’

  ‘Well, he won’t see much there, will he?’

  ‘He’s got a bird book,’ said Mum defensively. ‘Ticks things off in it.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Sparrows and chaffinches. A few blue tits. A blackbird.’

  Cookie harrumphed. ‘He should join the naturalists.’

  ‘I think he’s a bit young for that.’

  ‘They might take him. I’ll talk to Bert Flood.’

  Cookie was as good as her word. She did talk to Mr Flood, and in 1959 I became the youngest member of the Wharfedale Naturalists’ Society.

  I’m still not entirely certain whether or not my mother thought it would involve me taking all my clothes off.

  I was never going to be an intellectual. I was bright enough later on in life – reasonably intelligent if not academic – but in the early years I was a slow developer. I did, though, have two facilities that I have always found useful – tenacity and aptitude. Or, put another way, I was determined and good with my hands. Well, I see little point in being able to understand pure maths and quantum physics if you can’t hang a cupboard. I might not have the appetite to get through Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, but I could build you a shelf to put it on.

  Let me loose on something I’m passionate about and I can go at it like a terrier. It’s always been that way.

  Arts and Crafts

  John Brown was good at knitting. I could never see the fascination in ‘knit one, purl one’. He’d sit there, with his  brow furrowed under his mop of perfectly combed dark-brown hair, wearing his pale-blue jumper, and turn out yard after yard of scarf. And it wasn’t even that cold. But Mrs Rishworth seemed pleased with him.

  I preferred other forms of craft. I was quite good at sticking things together – bits of paper on to card, that sort of thing – but it never seemed to impress her much.

  I was better at home. I’d seen a picture in a magazine about how you could make miniature gardens in old 78-rpm records. All you had to do was put the record in hot water and it would become bendy. Then you pulled up the sides, away from the centre, and as the record cooled it turned into a wavy-edged bowl complete with drainage hole in the base. Quite a few people got a miniature garden for Christmas that year. I think they were a bit surprised.

  I was especially good at making model theatres. One came in the form of a multicoloured cut-out book from Pollock’s in London. That was the Christmas I got my electric train. To my father’s dismay it remained parked in the siding all day while I made the theatre from the one-shilling-and-sixpenny book.

  Other theatres, and even television studios with miniature cameras and scenery, I made from cardboard and balsa wood, bought from the Hobbies Annual. It was a treasure trove of delights, the Hobbies Annual – packed with everything from dolls’ house kits to electric motors and steam engines. I would pore over its pages in bed and work out what elaborate constructions I could make, if only I had half-a-crown pocket money instead of a shilling.

  But one day Mrs Rishworth came up with an idea that would allow me to compete with John Brown.

  ‘Children! Now, put down your pens and listen.’

  She turned away from the blackboard with its carefully written chalk letters – ‘f’s with big loops and ‘r’s that looked like staples gone wrong – and peered imperiously through her rimless spectacles, enunciating every word as clearly as she always did.

  ‘We are going to have a competition.’

  ‘What sort of competition, miss?’ asked Peter Earle from the back row.

  ‘If you will allow me to continue, I shall tell you.’

  ‘Oh. Right, miss. Sorry, miss.’

  ‘There will, in fact, be two competitions. The first will be for peg dolls …’

  ‘Peg whats, miss?’

  ‘PEG DOLLS!’

  ‘Where do you get them, miss?’

  ‘If you will listen, Peter Earle, I will explain.’

  ‘Yes, miss. Sorry, miss.’

  Mrs Rishworth drew herself up to her full height – and she was not small. Her ample matron’s bosom heaved under her thick red cardigan and white blouse. The pearls at her neck glistened as she spoke.

  ‘Clothes pegs like these …’ at this point she bent down and picked one up from her desk ‘… with the aid of small scraps of material and coloured pencils can be turned into dolls like these …’
She took from her desk drawer a small doll that appeared to be one of the wise men from the nativity – with a crown and a flowing robe. She carefully lifted up the robe to reveal the two wooden ‘legs’ of the peg.

  Somebody wolf-whistled. Mrs Rishworth pretended not to notice.

  ‘You can make any kind of doll you wish, and there will be a prize for the best one.’

  ‘Where do we get the pegs, please, miss?’ asked John Brown, his mind ever on the domestic.

  ‘I shall give you each a peg and you can bring them back when they are finished. You have the summer holidays to make them so I should get thinking now about what your doll will be.’

  Johnny Williams said he was going to make an engine driver. The girls started talking about ball gowns. I didn’t know what to make. The hubbub rose.

  ‘Now what did I say?’ boomed Mrs Rishworth once more.

  ‘That we have to bring them back after the holidays …’

  ‘Yes, and I also said that we would have two competitions. The second will be for something to do with nature. Can you guess what?’

  There was a momentary silence before Ian Gledhill said, in his deep and unenthusiastic voice, ‘Pets?’

  ‘No. Not pets. We are going to have a competition for pressed flowers.’

  At this John Brown brightened and Peter Earle slumped forward on his desk and muttered, ‘Aw, bloody hell!’

  Mrs Rishworth brought her selective hearing into play, and one of the girls got her out of a spot by asking, ‘How do we press them?’

  ‘I shall show you.’ (There were lots of ‘I shall’s from Mrs Rishworth. She was not an ‘I will’ sort of lady.)

  She took a newspaper from the shopping basket by her chair, opened it out and laid it on her desk. Then she removed a buttercup from the jam jar on the windowsill behind her and laid it carefully on top of the paper.