Nobbut a Lad

by Alan Titchmarsh

  For some unaccountable reason the area around the fountain was known as the Monkey Rack. It might have been a reference to its use as a pick-up point for courting couples. Certainly ‘I’ll meet you at the Monkey Rack’ was a well-used phrase – the spot being the junction between the two main shopping streets – and it was a favourite location for courting couples to canoodle on the benches after dark. It was also the place where I saw a man who was a legend among Yorkshire folk at that time – William Holt.

  I heard him before I saw him. ‘Whoaaa!’ was the cry. It came bellowing out of thin air and nearly lifted me out of my shoes. I was dawdling along, not looking where I was going – Lone Rangering, probably. I turned round and saw directly behind me a towering brown-and-white horse and, on top of it, like St George on his charger, a man with a large moustache, riding boots and breeches and a tweed jacket. There were leather saddlebags on either side of the horse, and having stopped the towering steed in its tracks, the rider slid down off the animal’s back and began to unbuckle them.

  I didn’t know who he was. He looked a bit scary, and I remembered what my mum had said about strange men. They didn’t come stranger than this one. I backed off towards the side of the fountain, but peered round it furtively and watched what happened.

  Several people crossed the street to greet him. He shook their hands, and boomed his hellos like something out of Charles Dickens. As well as telling me about the dangers of talking to strange men, my mother had also told me about The Pickwick Papers. Here was Mr Pickwick to the life.

  He dipped into one of the saddlebags and pulled out a handful of books. He began to sign them and handed them out to the people around him. ‘That’ll be fifteen shillings.’ They’d give him a pound note and he’d pull change from the other saddlebag. The whole procedure was over within ten minutes, then he was back on the horse and away. It was only later, after he’d ridden off, quite literally, into the sunset, that I discovered who he was. A man with a small boy had bought one of his books – The Wizard of Whirlaw. He showed me what it said on the dust jacket.

  William Holt started work as a weaver at the age of twelve and at the same time taught himself four languages, writing the words in the dust on the beams above his loom. Then he began to travel. He sailed up the Yangtze, and travelled to America and Japan, Russia and Persia. He boasted that he had ‘sailed through the Yellow Sea with a murderer, struggled with a madman armed with a fire-axe onboard a ship in a typhoon, was challenged to a duel in Seville and almost murdered in Japan’.

  He built his own sailing ship while working in logging camps on the Pacific Coast of Canada, and reported from the Spanish Civil War. Then he founded British Mobile Libraries and Books on Wheels, before going on to invent and patent an improved shuttle for automatic looms.

  The Wizard of Whirlaw was the third book he had published ‘off his own bat’ and he rode around Yorkshire on his horse, selling it from his saddlebag.

  Last year I found a copy in a second-hand bookshop, and forty-five years after seeing the author flogging it for fifteen bob, I bought it for £6.89. It is a curious read; a bit dated and full of ‘messages’, but the plaudits on the back of the dust jacket are those that any writer would be proud of. Along with encouraging quotes of Holt’s work from The Times Literary Supplement, and the Daily Dispatch, are the endorsements of two notable names: ‘I recommend it highly as a bedside book’, H. G. Wells; and ‘Mr Holt’s autobiography is of a kind rather more unusual nowadays’, George Orwell.

  You can’t argue with Orwell. Unusual is definitely the right word. I looked up in time to see William Holt, author, adventurer, explorer, war correspondent, linguist and inventor of the automatic shuttle trotting off down Brook Street and shouting a greeting to Mrs Briggs, who was trotting upwards on the other side with her dustbins full of pigswill. Her eyes sparkled more than usual as she shot him a melting smile and gave a gentle wave.

  I’ve had the greatest respect for horsemen and women ever since.

  Like all the lads in our street, I couldn’t wait to drive, but when you’re eight or nine, seventeen seems light years away. There were no Chopper bikes or skateboards in the 1950s – you had either a second-hand bike from the saleroom or a Palm Beach from the Wharfedale Cycle Depot on Leeds Road. If you were happy to pay on the never-never, there was Mrs Woodrup’s catalogue, or if you had patience and a couple of stressed-out parents, there were Kensitas cigarette gift coupons.

  But with a bit of ingenuity and some old pram wheels, we could each make our own customised form of transport. They varied in horsepower, safety features and design, but they all provided one thing – the ability to travel faster than walking pace down the middle of Nelson Road.

  Wheels

  ‘What the bloody ’ell’s that?’ asked Stuart Whittaker.

  He was older than I was, and always a bit dismissive. I think he thought there was something deeply suspicious about a lad who liked gardening. That’s probably why he called me ‘Petunia’. I think the other kids in the street thought he meant to say ‘Petula’. They knew who Petula Clark was, but petunia was not part of their vocabulary.

  Stuart’s incredulity on this particular day was not directed at my gardening, but at my transport.

  Before we all had bikes, there were other, more spectacular ways of getting about. Almost without exception, every kid in the street had a bogie – a wooden cart on wheels, on which you could lie down and propel yourself from the top of the street to the bottom; steering with a piece of rope attached to the front axle.

  Some bogies had large wheels, some had small wheels, usually nicked from prams and pushchairs that had fallen apart.

  Mickey Hudson’s was made from one of his dad’s orange boxes and so was always a bit fragile. The wheels were small, too, and felt every bump down the road. Every time he rode it, Mickey would get off looking mildly concussed. Stephen Feather – Fezz to his mates – had one that was the bottom of a pram, big, curly springs included. Fezz’s dad was never much of a one for DIY, and so Fezz sat on a plank tied between the axles. He’d shoot down the road like Boadicea in her chariot, and woe betide you if your shins got in the way. Fezz’s springs could inflict damage every bit as severe as Boadicea’s knives.

  I was rather proud of my bogie, built in the cellar by my dad, from two pairs of large pram wheels and three floorboards, and fitted with a brake – a lump of wood that was pivoted so it could be brought into contact with one of the back wheels. Used insensitively, the effect of the brake would be sudden and quite dramatic – the vehicle spinning round and hurling the occupant into the road. Gravel burns were frequent.

  On the particular day that Stuart Whittaker saw me, I had converted my bogie into a chuck wagon. An old blackout curtain had been fastened over four lumps of broom handle that were used as uprights, and I’d made cardboard AA and RAC signs for the front, plus a tax disc – the sort of optional extras that were all the rage in the Wild West.

  With much more wind resistance, I discovered that I could push off the bogie at the top of the street and sit there with my hands on the reins while it chugged slowly downhill, hardly touching the brake. The ride was not as thrilling, admittedly, but it would last longer, and with no need to apply the brake, the bogie would just grind to a halt at the bottom of the road. That way, the chances of gravel burns or warning toots from Samuel Ledgard’s buses were more unlikely. I was happy.

  ‘Yer daft bugger! Why don’t you go any faster? Chicken!’ Stuart would shout after me. I’d bite my lip and pretend I didn’t care.

  And anyway, the chuck-wagon mode wouldn’t last long. Soon I’d tire of the slow speed and decide that it was, indeed, a racing car that I needed. The blackout material would go back into the house, the AA and RAC signs into the dustbin, and my sleek new machine – with silver sticky tape from the bike shop stuck down the side for go-faster stripes – would become a souped-up motor.

  I’d lie down head first on the wooden boards and shorten the steering rope. Then
I’d kick off at the top of Nelson Road and career down to the bottom, teeth clenched, praying all the while that I would not encounter Mrs Barker with her shopping – ‘Get off the pavement, you silly boy!’ – that a bus would not come out of the garage and that no traffic would be crossing Little Lane when I shot across it and down the blacksmith’s track.

  Most of the time I got away with it. Now and again I came to grief. If a bus did decide to come out of the garage, I would have to bring kamikaze techniques into play – throwing myself off the bogie and allowing it to crash into the bus-garage wall with great risk of damage.

  One day, while my mum was out shopping, Mickey Hudson, employing just these sort of tactics, saw his bogie shoot underneath the bus, as he rolled clear. Off down the road went Samuel Ledgard’s blue double-decker, and somewhere underneath it, embedded in its exhaust system, went Mickey’s bogie, too. They never found it. At least, not while we were around to blame.

  My dad had made my bogie well. The nuts and bolts that held on the metal axles lasted for several weeks, but finally metal fatigue got the better of even them.

  ‘Can you mend it?’ I’d ask.

  ‘I’ve done it twice. Why don’t you do it yourself?’

  His impatience was understandable. There were enough jobs to do around the house without continually having to repair my wheels.

  I searched around in the cellar and found a hammer and some nails. My skills did not extend to the use of a screwdriver. The axle would be lined up, the nails bashed into the rough lump of wood, and then bent over to hold the metal rod in place. I would get another half-dozen runs out of the bogie until the nails fell out. Then the axle would part from the body once more and the bogie would thud to a halt, to be overtaken by the wheels making their bid for freedom down the hill.

  In moments of supreme independence I would take the bogie up to the moors. The trouble was, it didn’t run nearly so well on the rough tracks that wove between bracken and heather, though I could career over a really steep bank of heather and down the rocky slopes of Backstone Beck, landing up in the water and then traipsing back home with squelching socks. If the water in the river was cold, then the water in the moorland stream was icy.

  Once a week, on a Saturday morning, my bogie would be commandeered by Dad. ‘They’re not clean trousers, are they?’ he’d enquire, doing up the fastenings on his bib-and-brace overalls.

  ‘No. I’ve worn them all week.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. Come on.’

  Dad would walk, while I lay on a rough hessian sack on the bogie and pushed it with one leg, along Little Lane and down Lower Wellington Road to the gasworks.

  ‘’Ello,’Arry. ’Alf a ’undredweight of number three, please,’ my dad would bellow above the din.

  Harry Thwaites, on duty there every Saturday morning, his face blackened from the coke dust, would take the sack and hold it under an enormous steel hopper. Happy that it was secure, he’d then pull a lever and the coke would thunder out of the hopper into the sack. The trick was to stop the flow when there was just enough slack left at the top of the bag to allow a lump of sisal twine to be fastened round it. Too full and Harry would curse and pull some of the coke out with his horny, calloused hands that were by now the same colour as the coke; too empty and my dad would raise an eyebrow at being given short measure.

  The half-crown having been handed over, the plump and dusty sack would be flung on to the bogie and with Dad on the rope at the front, and me with my back to the heavy load and pushing with my legs, we’d make the slower return journey uphill.

  Once home, Dad would lift the sack from the bogie, untie the string, and tip the contents down the coal chute into the cellar. The sack would be rolled up, the string tied round it, and the neat package put on a shelf in the cellar until next week’s trip.

  Until then I’d be free to use the bogie as I wished: to race the other lads in the street, to take it down to the riverside gardens where smooth tarmac paths criss-crossed the grass, or, as on one particularly eventful day, to intercept my mum at the bottom of the street and load up the bogie with her shopping.

  ‘That’s very nice. Have you had a good morning?’

  ‘Yeah. All right.’

  ‘Anything exciting?’

  ‘Not really.’ I didn’t tell her about Mickey’s bogie going underneath the bus. After careful consideration I didn’t think it was a good idea.

  The litany of stations from Ilkley to Leeds is as vivid to me today as it was then: Ilkley, Ben Rhydding, Burley in Wharfedale, Menston, Guiseley, Rawdon, Newlay and Horsforth, Calverley and Rodley, Kirkstall and Leeds City. There was always a sigh of relief when we tumbled off the train back in Ilkley, walking out under the big-faced clock on the end wall of the station, weary and coated in city grime, to walk along Railway Road and Trafalgar Road, back to number 34 Nelson Road, where the kettle would be put on, the fire lit, and my sister and I would climb the stairs to our bedrooms to play with whatever we’d been bought to keep us quiet while Mum tried on the hat or Dad the suit.

  It wouldn’t be much. An Airfix kit of a Spitfire for me, and a cut-out doll with dresses for Kath. I’d hare up to my bedroom at the top of the house – a converted attic – and look out through the dormer window at the moors, happy to be home and away from the clamour of the city.

  Only once a year did Ilkley succumb to rampant commercialism, and then it had a kind of glamour all its own.

  The Trades Fair

  Once a year, in the King’s Hall and Winter Gardens – Ilkley’s Edwardian assembly rooms – the local shopkeepers got together, courtesy of the local Chamber of Trade, and put on the Trades Fair. To London children accustomed to bright lights and hoopla, it would have been a tame affair, but for the kids in this small northern town, it was the glamorous event of the year. Entry was free, and for as long as you wanted you could wander around between washing machines and fridges, bicycles and motor scooters lit up like movie stars and pirouetting on revolving turntables to the strains of piped music. There would be wardrobes with ornamental gadroons on the doors made by Maurice Booth, Ilkley’s finest cabinet-maker, and electric train layouts built by Mr Marshall – the man with the sweet shop that also sold toys.

  ‘I’ll meet you there at six o’clock,’ said Mickey Hudson, and as the town-hall clock struck the hour, we sauntered in, hands in pockets, to see what we could get for nothing.

  On the stage of the King’s Hall, the Gas Board would have several kitchens laid out with the latest labour-saving appliances – an eye-level grill or a glass-doored oven – and there would be leaflets, hundreds of them, to be collected and put in a carrier bag for inspection that evening when you got home. It didn’t matter what they were; it was enough to have them.

  Collecting things was something we all felt driven to do; there was some kind of security in ownership of a collection, some kind of status. In leaner weeks we’d search through the dustbins at the back of the bus garage at the bottom of the street when the drivers and conductors were at work, picking out from among the fag ends and sweet packets the ends of bus-ticket rolls – discarded once the central pink line appeared to show that there were only several feet of paper left. We’d pull out cigarette packets and tear off the front and back covers so that each became a crude playing card. With these we’d play snap, and feel as rich as a king when we scooped a whole pile of them.

  There were the cheap brands that were not much treasured – the green-and-orange Woodbine packet, the creamy-coloured Player’s Weights, the nautical Player’s Navy Cut, with the picture of the bearded sailor, and the sober Senior Service packet in white and navy blue. Most of them were from packets of ten, but sometimes there were twenties of classy fags like Olivier and du Maurier that were prized far beyond their actual worth.

  After the Trades Fair, we could boast of far grander pieces of paper and cardboard showing illustrations of the latest record player or wireless, or the bike that everybody wanted but nobody would ever have.

/>   Parents came to check out a new bed, or to look at the light fittings that hung from temporary ceilings erected by Arthur English on the Grove, but for Mickey and me, once we’d watched Mr Marshall’s trains go round the track a couple of times, and asked for anything with Hornby Dublo or Tri-ang printed on it, there were just two shops that cut the mustard – Allen and Walker, the record shop, and Mr Oliver, the nurseryman.

  Long before Woolworths started selling records, Allen and Walker at the bottom of Cowpasture Road had built two sound booths lined with pegboard where you could go and shut yourself in while they played you the single of your choice. At four shillings and sixpence they were not cheap, and it seemed only a matter of months before these products of Parlophone and Columbia were six shillings and fourpence.

  With a shilling pocket money a week, it would be a month or more before you could afford to buy one, but then to have the latest single before anybody else did was the kind of one-upmanship we all aspired to. I was the first kid in our street to own ‘She Loves You’, but long before that I had invested in Russ Conway’s ‘China Tea’ and discovered the hard way that it had much less in the way of social cachet.

  On their stand in the King’s Hall, Allen and Walker would show off the very latest in Fidelity record players and appropriately named Wharfedale speakers. It was here that Dad bought his classical selections, but Mickey and I had different tastes back then.

  ‘Have you got any Elvis Presley?’

  ‘Course we’ ave,’ replied the assistant.

  ‘Can you put it on?’ asked Mickey.

  ‘No. They won’t let me. You’ve got to listen to this stuff.’ He pointed upwards into the air, indicating the sickly strains of Mantovani and ‘Charmaine’, which was supposedly more conducive to selling fridges and cookers.