In the lotties, on grass, even though it was all lumpy and bumpy, we had rags or jumpers for goalposts and played complicated games, even if we were just two-a-side. One side would be kicking in, or attacking one set of goals, till a certain point, with the other side defending, then we changed round. There was one game called Worky, short for Workington, whereby if the attacking side scored a bye, i.e. you missed the goal and it went for a goal kick, then you changed round and the other side attacked.
If a game had gone on too long, like all week, then eventually you would hear the cry of ‘NEXT GOAL WINS!’ coming from the lotties.
I woke up each day looking forward to playing football, my life and pleasure revolved around it, playing at school at playtime, and before and after school, and then in the street at home. I usually kicked a ball on my way to school, or the shops, getting in everyone’s way. I was consumed by playing football, like nothing else, probably nothing else since.
The thing about football is that you need very little tackle – just a ball of sorts and some vaguely flat ground. Most of all, anyone can have a go, big or small, weak or strong, gangly or athletic, droopy or dynamic. The most awkward, ungainly-looking kid would often turn out to be a wizard when he got on the ball. No wonder the whole world plays football, from the most affluent country to the most deprived.
I was aware of this even when young. I used to imagine, while kicking a ball on my own, that boys just like me were playing football in the street, in every corner of the planet. I was communing with them. And also communing with all the boys who had ever played football in the past.
If no one else was around, no mother would let them out, or the weather was too grim, I would play on my own. I must have spent hours kicking a tennis ball against our washhouse wall. I would practise returning it with my left and then my right foot. As I was going to be a professional footballer, I needed to be able to use either foot.
When not playing, I cut out and collected photographs from the newspapers of my favourite players. We didn’t have a pink ’un or a green ’un printed in Dumfries or Carlisle, the Saturday afternoon edition of the local newspaper, containing all the football news, but often someone from a bigger town, who had the advantage of these wonders, would leave a copy in a bin or on a park bench.
My best fave player for many years was Billy Houliston, which dated from my Dumfries years. He was a bullet-headed centre forward who played for Queen of the South, the Dumfries team. He managed three caps for Scotland, which was unusual for a provincial player. When Scotland played, I would be shaking with nerves, unable to bear it if they got beaten by England, my little heart thumping as I listened to the game on the radio.
Aged fourteen, after all those years playing in the street and the allotments, convinced I was a natural, I joined a proper team, a junior football team, Kingstown Rovers, who were in the Carlisle and District Under-15 league. The manager, the one who picked me, also happened to be our milkman. I suspect he took pity on me, knowing our family situation, when he asked me to sign on. You did, in fact, have to sign a form, which was thrilling, making it feel ever so professional. We had proper strips – red and white quarters, same design as Bristol Rovers, though they are in blue.
I managed to acquire a pair of real boots from the Co-op, which meant we got a divvy. They had proper studs and long white laces which I washed for the first few weeks, then gave up. I bought spare studs in a packet and a tin of dubbin. Our games had proper referees. We had a home pitch at Kingstown, and real nets, and even a dressing room, which was in a chapel hall. Playing away, on the other side of Carlisle, or out in the country, we often had to get changed on the side of the pitch, which was horrible. Playing in the rain is not a problem as all footballers know, at any level. In fact, it enhances the physical elements and closeness to nature, but afterwards, returning to your pile of clothes, they would be totally soaked. I would drag myself home on my bike in sodden clothes, wet and shivering, as well as knackered after being battered by some rural lumps.
I imagined myself as a skilful inside right. That was the term at the time. All football teams had the same eleven named positions and had done so for almost a hundred years: goalie, right back, left back, centre half, right half, left half, right outside, inside right, centre forward, inside left, outside left. They were numbered 1–11, so a number 11 was always an outside left. In professional football, he was often a little weedy bloke, usually Scottish, who ran up and down the wing, did lots of tricks, beat the thick-necked fullback, and finally crossed the ball. He never tackled, never went back to defend, just hugged the touchlines. It meant he was out of the game for ages. Such fancy-dan luxury players have all gone. Now everyone has to be a non-stop workhorse.
While awfully skilful in my head, I did have one problem: I was so weak and weedy that even wearing proper boots, with iron-hard toecaps and rock-hard leather at the ankles, I would kick the ball my hardest – and it rolled about six feet. I just did not have the puff or power to make a killer pass to our centre forward. So my thing became clever short passes, then shouting at the other player for not reading my clever pass.
My love of football has never left me. I played Sunday football till I was fifty, despite two cartilage operations, which was stupid. In the end, I could still play football once a week – but not recover from playing football. Eventually I had to have a new knee. I still miss football, all the time. No other physical, competitive activity has taken its place.
Playing football got rid of so much energy, anguish and bad temper. I never knew I had a temper, till I played football. I consider myself peaceful and placid. I never shout at people in real life, get angry, dislike or hate anyone. But on the pitch when I played football, I was screaming all the time, usually at my own team. Or myself. I realise now it was a brilliant release. Not just a pleasure.
For several years I was a keen Boy Scout. Warwick Road Presbyterian did not have a troop, so, along with Reg, I joined Chapel Street Church of Scotland, the 17th Carlisle Troop. Reg and I remained firm friends, despite the fact that I was at the Creighton. We did most things together – except play football, which he hated – and he included me when he was doing things with his grammar school friends.
We managed to turn the 17th Carlisle into an anti-Boy Scouts scout troop. We mocked and poured scorn, disdaining all those badge-baggers who seemed to dominate all the other troops, who could hardy move for all the badges on their arms, determined to make it as a King’s Scout. Reg and I were eventually made patrol leaders, even though we had not one badge between us, apart from our Tenderfoot Badge, which you had to pass to be a Boy Scout. We played Bulldog Drummond in the church hall, did marches and ceremonies, but the best thing, and the reason why we stayed in so long, was the Boy Scout camp. Neither of our families went away on holidays, so going to Edinburgh, as we did one year, and then later to Aberdeen, or just for the odd weekend to Ratlingate, which was a Scout campsite to the west of Carlisle, was a wonderful escape and adventure. Ratlingate seemed miles and miles out in the wild country, for I once walked all the way home, carrying my pack, having spent my bus fare, but I now realise it was just in the suburbs, hardly in the real country. I thought all the Scout leaders were great blokes, lovely men, and later, when I heard people tittering about Scout leaders and what some of them got up to, I could not believe it.
On Saturday morning most kids went to the children’s matinee at the local cinema. In our case it was the Lonsdale, the best cinema in town, and we were all members of the ABC Minors. Each week kids whose birthday it was were invited up on stage; we all cheered and they got a present. It was surprising how often the same kids went up week after week. We were shown a cowboy film, a serial or a comedy, and we all screamed and shouted, either in terror or laughter. Slightly older kids, about fifteen or sixteen, were made monitors and were supposed to keep the rowdier element under control, but the more advanced of them used their superior position, and the dark, to canoodle with their girlfriends. Canood
le? Did we use that word? Sounds very stagy. Canoodling was probably what they did in some of the films, not that we liked any soppy films, with kissing and stuff. We wanted the Lone Ranger or Laurel and Hardy.
Members of the ABC Minors had a song we sang each Saturday – and I can remember the words after all these years, which were sung to the tune of ‘Blaze Away’. They put the words up on a screen and a blob bounced over each word so you could sing along.
We are the boys and girls well known as Minors of the ABC
And every Saturday we line up
To see the films we like and shout aloud with glee
We love to laugh and have a singsong
Such a happy crowd are we
We’re all pals together, the Minors of the ABC.
I assumed at the time that the ABC Minors was special to Carlisle, so how lucky were we, but later on, when I went out into the big wide world, well a bit broader than Carlisle, I discovered everyone of my age in the fifties had been an ABC Minor. Or similar.
It was a badge of belonging, being an ABC Minor, and it is a badge now. The further you get away from your childhood, the more you find bonds between you and others the same age, despite their backgrounds, regions or social class. The fifties has many passwords, secret signs by which we can identify each other. But I suppose all generations do.
When I got a bit older, I would go to the theatre in Carlisle, Her Majesty’s, a fine old Victorian traditional theatre, with stalls, balconies and gods high up, where once Charlie Chaplin performed. A touring rep came once a year, the Salisbury Arts, and put on West End plays, usually by J.B. Priestley, which my mother admired and I would sometimes go with her, if she paid.
There were about ten cinemas in Carlisle, and lying awake at night when I can’t sleep I often try to remember all their names, and where they were. There was the Lonsdale, the City, Palace, Botchergate, Public Hall, Rex, Regal, Stanley and the Argyl in Harraby. Oh no, I won’t sleep tonight. I am sure there were ten . . .
No one had TV, so going to the flicks was the big excitement. People often went twice a week, so the queues were enormous, right round the block. You stood there, in the cold and rain, as the line crawled forward, still with no sight of the cinema, worried that you had invested all this time and would not get in. Some jobsworth in a stained uniform with epaulettes would stick his arm out just as you got to the head of the queue and say, ‘That’s it, house full.’
Queues were a way of life, for buses, football games, shops, the cinema, almost everything. People were so obedient, never queue-jumping, or else you would soon get told off. I suppose it was a hangover from the war, when we all had to be obedient, if we were going to beat Hitler. Many had been in the services of some sort and were used to doing what they were told.
For many years, Britain was caricatured abroad as being a nation of pathetic, patient, craven queuers, whereas in Europe it was always a scrum, each person for themselves. That is all gone. At my local bus stop people don’t queue, they just sit or stand around and then get on in any old order, not worrying about people jumping ahead. It is partly because there are more regular buses, and also no conductors – just press your card, so the bus won’t go until we all are on, so what’s the hurry? Has the bus system changed our characters or are we no longer a nation that submits to queuing and regimentation?
I joined the junior library at Tullie House, a scary place with beady-eyed librarians with steely specs and grey buns who would chuck you out if you talked or mucked around, but, oh, the excitement of going there and finding a Just William or a Biggles book. If you found several, and could only take out two, you would secrete one for your friends, or for when you next returned, sticking it in the reference part with the nature books or boring stuff like that, where no normal boy would look. A stern librarian would be watching from her station and bawl you out. I do honestly think that no book since has given me such pure joy as the Just William stories.
As exams got more frequent at secondary school, I did plough through most of Dickens and even dragged my weary eyes though Dostoevsky and other so-called classic authors, but dear God, they were so dense and dreary before you got to anything remotely interesting or amusing. But with Just William, I was always totally hooked from page one, laughing all the way through. The stories were set in some southern middle-class posh village, and William’s parents lived in the sort of house I had never seen, with staff and tennis courts, and yet I so identified completely with him.
Biggles gave me equal enjoyment, though without any of the laughs. With William and Biggles, it was so wonderful, having discovered them, to find there was a whole series of books, which I gobbled up, just as quickly as I could find the next one in the library.
One day, Reg and I decided to write a fan letter to Capt. W.E. Johns, the author of Biggles. We thought it was such an amazing, original idea and we told everyone, not realising thousands of boys must be doing the same. We didn’t know if he was alive or dead, or if it that was his real name.
Months went by then, to our astonishment, we got a reply. Reg had actually put his address on the letter, though it was our joint idea, and we had shared the cost of the stamp, so we argued over who owned the letter. We agreed to keep it for a year each. Reg got it first. But he never gave it back to me. The rotter. Said he couldn’t find it. It could have been the start of my collecting hobby, which takes up so much of my life today.
In the comics I read, like The Hotspur and Wizard, there were always public-school stories about a life and people I had never met. When younger, I had loved The Dandy and Beano, but the appeal there was easier to understand, as it was funny, silly stuff for kids. The Hotspur and Wizard, along with the Adventure, Rover and Champion, all seemed like grown-up comics, with lots to read and very small print. We swapped with each other or bought our own when we were in funds. ‘In funds’ – that was the sort of phrase Billy Bunter would have used.
Being Scottish, and having the Sunday Post delivered each week, we loved their comic strips, Oor Wullie and The Broons. At Christmas, if we were lucky, our mother managed to buy one or both of the Christmas annuals.
The biggest source of entertainment for all the nation was the radio. The BBC’s first live radio broadcast was in 1920, but it was not till the thirties that most families in the land had a set or access to one. Ours was stuck into the lightbulb socket in the ceiling in the middle of the living room and had to be unplugged when we wanted to insert a lightbulb. The wire got frayed and tangled, so goodness knows how we never set fire to the house.
I loved Children’s Hour, which had been going since the 1920s. It was from five to six, after we had got home from school and after our tea. It was aimed at boys and girls from five onwards, introduced by ‘Uncle Mac’ – Derek McCulloch, our favourite uncle. So we were told. There was a series called Toytown, starring Larry the Lamb and featuring a character called Mr Grouser the Grocer. I liked Norman and Henry Bones: The Boy Detectives and also Out With Romany, which was a nature programme about two children being taken on a country walk. I never knew, during all the years I listened to it, that Romany himself was living beside us in Carlisle. His real name was the Reverend George Bramwell Evens and he was a local Methodist minister who wrote a lot of books for children.
We always tuned into the Scottish Home Service, where we also had Kathleen Garscadden, ‘Aunty Kathleen’ – obviously our favourite aunty. If we entered any competitions we wrote to Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow. Which I often did – and won myself a silver pencil. There was a very funny Scottish serial called Tammy Troot, about a trout, and a long-running series we all listened to as a family called The McFlannels, about a Glasgow tenement family. All the surnames were based on materials, such as Mrs McCotton. My favourite Scottish comedian was Jimmy Logan, whose catchphrase was ‘Sausages is the boys’, one of those dopey sayings you can’t believe ever caught on. Stanley Baxter was even cleverer and funnier, as he did lots of different voices, many of them women, all a bit camp,
but of course I didn’t know what camp meant. Like Round the Horne and all their double entendres, we laughed, without quite knowing the joke.
ITMA was probably the most popular wartime programme. My father particularly loved it, laughed all the way through, cheered him up when his favourite characters appeared, such as Mrs Mopp, who always said, ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ There might have been a suggestive undercurrent to that question, reminiscent of Max Miller and thirties music-hall humour, or George Formby with his little stick of Blackpool rock. During the war, the government kept tight hold of anything not only secret but possibly unwholesome.
ITMA began in 1939 and the title stood for It’s That Man Again, originally a newspaper reference to Hitler, who was always in the papers, but it was transferred to Tommy Handley, the star of the show. As a primary school kid I never found it as amusing as my parents did. The same stock phrases seem to be repeated all the time, and the same situations, but the nation loved it.
I preferred by far The Goon Show, which began later, in 1951, and seemed so much cleverer and more anarchic than ITMA. My parents could not see what was funny about it, so of course that was another plus. The sound effects parodied the traditional BBC productions, making footsteps go on forever, or faster and faster. My mother thought the silly voices were just silly, but at school we smart boys in the A stream, and at the grammar school, loved them, competing to repeat the jokes and do the voices of Neddie Seagoon or Bloodnok.
I found Wilfred Pickles, with Mabel at the piano, who went round the country doing corny interviews, a total pain, but he was immensely popular. He had a strong Lancashire accent but, to my ears, he was trying to be affected and posh and came out sounding condescending. The Billy Cotton Band Show, which began in 1949, was equally corny, but good fun, with loud, jolly popular music, and always began with Billy himself shouting, ‘Wakey-wakey!’ Don’t these old radio programmes sound pathetic, with their banal catchphrases, yet The Billy Cotton Band Show became a highlight of the country’s Sunday lunchtime. People of a certain age still think of it when they are sitting down to their roast beef and Yorkshire pud.
The Co-Op's Got Bananas Page 11
