Road to the Dales, The Story of a Yorkshire Lad

by Phinn, Gervase

  There are two parks in Rotherham and both were favourite haunts of children in the 1950s and 60s. Clifton Park, on the corner of Clifton Lane and Doncaster Road, was created to serve the leisure needs of a growing population. The opening ceremony was by all accounts a memorable affair, attended by thousands who were entertained with fireworks and bands. The high point of the festivities was perhaps not the ascent by Captain Whelan in a hot air balloon but when one of the town councillors became entangled in the ropes and was unceremoniously lifted off the ground by his legs as the balloon rose. Fortunately, the poor man managed to disentangle himself. The park had a children's paddling pool, a cenotaph, gardens, lawns and picnic areas. Sometimes on warm summer Sunday evenings my parents would take me to the park to sit by the domed and pillared bandstand and listen to the Salvation Army or one of the colliery bands.

  I preferred Boston Park. There were fewer park-keepers hovering around to tell children to keep to the path, and more space and freedom. At the entrance stood a small squat building, 'Boston Castle', with battlements and small square mullioned windows, erected as a hunting lodge by the Earl of Effingham, who originally owned the land. The local newspaper, the Rotherham Advertiser, once described the folly as 'a castellated pigeon cote'. The Earl was something of a maverick and supported the American cause in the War of Independence. When he leased the area to Rotherham Corporation for conversion to a park he insisted that the opening ceremony took place on 4 July 1876, the centenary of the Declaration of Independence.

  Certain memories stick like burrs. When I was fifteen I had my first and last camping experience. With two of my friends, John and Paul, I took the bus to Sheffield and then the train to Bamforth station in Derbyshire. We equipped ourselves from the Army and Navy Stores in Rotherham with all that was deemed necessary for our expedition - sleeping bags, groundsheets, rucksacks, large khaki ex-army anoraks, boots, woollen balaclava helmets and substantial gloves. We also invested in a compass, metal water flasks and billycans. John brought the tent, which he had borrowed from his Uncle Norman, a seasoned camper.

  'Don't you think it's a bit cold to go camping?' Dad asked me, as I was packing my rucksack.

  'No, we'll be as snug as bugs in a rug when we're in our sleeping bags,' I told him, confident that this was going to be a really exciting experience.

  'I should have thought you'd have been better waiting until the summer,' said Mum. 'It gets very cold in October, you know.'

  The same advice was proffered when we were on the train.

  'Camping, are you?' asked the ticket collector. 'Not the weather for camping.'

  I have to admit, as I stared out of the steamy carriage window at the cold, grey autumn sky and the dark clouds hovering ominously overhead, to some slight apprehension.

  After a brisk walk from the station we decided to erect the tent in a field. I had had an idea, when I had first seen the rather compact canvas bag which John had brought with him, that Uncle Norman's tent might be a trifle small for the three of us. When it was taken out my fears became all too real.

  'Is that it?' I asked.

  'It's a bit small,' added Paul.

  'We'll be all right once we're in,' said John, trying to sound cheerful.

  We set up the tent under a tree at the side of the field after some difficulty. It had not occurred to any of us to bring a hammer to knock in the metal securing pins and we spent a largely unsuccessful hour bashing away with a large rock. After we had gathered some wood for a fire it began to rain, so that was abandoned and we clambered into the tent cold, wet and hungry. This was not turning out as we had expected. It rained and rained all night, the ground around us became a quagmire and a cold wind shook the tent. We huddled together inside our sleeping bags, hardly speaking and praying for the morning. I lay awake listening to the pattering of the rain on the canvas, and this was accompanied, when my two friends fell into deep sleep, by a nocturnal chorus of gurglings, snortings, wheezings and trumpetings. Then, when I eventually drifted off, I was awoken by a movement below me. Some creature was burrowing underneath the groundsheet. I shot up and out of the tent, waking my friends in the process. In the half-light I caught sight of glistening eyes. The ground was wet, the morning a cold misty grey and before me stood these mysterious shapes with shining eyes. I shot back into the tent and in a strange, muffled voice told my companions what I had seen. It took some courage for all three of us to stick our heads through the tent flap some time later, shaking with cold and fear. The mist had cleared and the cows observed us impassively with big sad eyes.

  I arrived back home later that afternoon. Mum met me at the kitchen door and asked, 'Did you enjoy your night under canvas then?'

  'It was marvellous,' I lied.

  Bonfire Night was always a special time. A month before 5 November, along with my friends, I would collect branches, tea chests, boxes, old chairs, rickety tables, crates, planks of wood, anything that would burn, and we would start constructing our bonfire. We had the ideal place at the back of the house - the allotment - and on a patch of earth the conical structure soon took shape.

  We would make a guy out of old clothes, stuff screwed-up paper in the arms and legs and paint a face on a piece of cardboard. He would be wheeled through the streets on a trolley made of pram wheels and two planks and we would ask passers-by: 'Penny for the guy?' With the money we collected we would buy fireworks.

  In October fireworks were for sale at the newsagent's and I would buy a thin rectangular box on the front of which, in garish reds and blues, the caption 'Light up the Sky with Standard Fireworks' was emblazoned. This small collection would be added to over the coming weeks up to 5 November. There would be Catherine wheels, blockbusters, squibs, jumping jacks, traffic lights, penny bangers, Roman candles, golden fountains, silver rain and rockets in brightly coloured cardboard tubes with a cone on the top and a thin wooden stick down the side.

  Mr Morgan devoted a special assembly at Broom Valley Juniors to the terrible dangers of Bonfire Night. His dramatic account told of boys (it was always boys) who had been maimed, disfigured, burned and scarred for life by not taking sufficient care. His cautionary tale was told each year of the foolish boy who had been dared by his friends to put a penny banger in an empty oil drum which had subsequently blown up, searing his face to such an extent that the whole of the skin had melted. It was a horrific picture. The message about the dangers of fireworks was rammed home by my Auntie Nora, who had been sister-in-charge of the Casualty Department at Doncaster Royal Infirmary and related yet more stories of accidents and tragedies.

  When it was dark, children and parents assembled on the allotment and gathered around the bonfire. The air was full of wood smoke and cordite and the rockets shot up into the dark sky and burst into sparkling rain. The adults supervised us as we took it in turn to light the twist of touchpaper on the fireworks and the sparklers. There was always a sense of disappointment when the wonderfully described firework fizzed and there followed a modest few seconds of showering sparks. Sometimes a firework failed to ignite and after a short period we would approach cautiously, prod it with a cane and place a bucket over the top. Later we would throw it into the bonfire where it would explode.

  The rockets were always saved for last and were put into milk bottles and lit with a small twist of rope. They shot into the night sky, to explode to the accompaniment of 'oooohs' and 'aaaahs'.

  My father would not countenance a guy being put on the fire. It might have been a decision he made when I, as a small child, had been terrified by the image of a human form in the flames. I had been taken to the municipal bonfire at Herring-thorpe playing fields when I was six and, sitting on my father's shoulders, had watched fascinated as the huge bonfire crackled into life. And then I saw him in the half-light - a man perched on the very top, with fat legs and a floppy hat. I could just make out a smiling face. I screamed and screamed and pointed to the figure in the flames.

  'There's a man, there's a man on the fire!' I cried, a
s the flames licked around him. People laughed.

  'It's just a guy,' my father told me. 'It's not real.'

  Perhaps that was why my father never allowed us to put a guy in the bonfire, or perhaps he found the image of a human form burning distasteful. Whatever the reason, when I had children of my own, having a guy on our bonfire was taboo.

  21

  When I was growing up the favourite place to visit, particularly if the weather was cold and wet, was the cinema. Rotherham and the area around had a goodly number of picture palaces - there was the Tivoli, the Empire (later renamed the Essoldo, then the Classic and finally the Cannon), the Whitehall, the Cinema House, the Regal (which became the Odeon and then the Scala) and the Hippodrome, and a bus ride away in neighbouring Sheffield there were a good few more. In the late 1950s and early 60s, when television got a firm foothold on people's leisure pursuits, the cinemas all closed down save for the Odeon, which became a bingo hall.

  On Saturday morning I would meet my friends at Adams' General Store and stock up on sweets prior to going to 'the pictures'. Sweet rationing had ended in 1953, so I was just the right age to sample the delights of what we called 'spice'. Adams' corner shop stocked a whole range of delicious confectionery: liquorice sticks and liquorice strings, pear drops, lemon drops, thick chewy brown slabs of McGowan's toffee, Sherbet Dabs, penny Arrow bars (strips of soft toffee), humbugs, aniseed balls, jelly babies, extra strong mints, boiled sweets, lollipops, chocolate bars, dolly mixtures, blackjacks, gobstoppers that changed colour when you sucked them, aniseed balls, halfpenny chews, all of which we ate with no concern for our teeth or our weight. In the week of the Coronation Mrs Adams said we could choose something on the house - but costing no more than threepence.

  With our pockets stuffed with sweets we walked into the town or caught the bus to Sheffield and joined a jostling, noisy queue of children outside the cinema. The manager and usherettes must have had some sort of masochistic streak to take on hundreds of noisy, lively, misbehaved, excitable urchins every week. It must have been a nightmare for them, but for me it was irresistibly attractive. In the musty darkness of the cinema I could escape from the real world for a couple of hours and into the domain of pirates and princes, cowboys and explorers, aliens and villains.

  The manager of one cinema, a tall thin man in a baggy suit and wearing a black dickie bow tie, would appear just before the doors were opened and shout down the queue. He would never complete the sentence because we would all shout out the last word at the top of our voices.

  'Any messing about and you're ...'

  'OUT!'

  We would file in through the foyer under the watchful eye of the manager, who would have a martyred expression on his long lugubrious face. Should he see a boy (it was always a boy) whom he had sent out the week before for misbehaving, he would grip the miscreant's collar and say, 'Out!' If the boy's friends came to his assistance they would be threatened with expulsion as well, and they soon quietened down. None would want to miss the next exciting episode.

  Once inside the cinema the noise was indescribable, and various missiles - peanuts, sweets, popcorn - would fly through the air until the manager strode to the front accompanied by two beefy usherettes to warn us again.

  'I've told you once,' shouted the manager, red-faced and angry, 'any messing about and you're ...'

  'OUT!' we all roared.

  Once the lights dimmed the cinema became a wild affair, with children shouting, cheering, jeering and jumping up in their seats, running up the aisle and spitting orange pips and shooting rice and rock-hard peas through pea-shooters. The lights would come on.

  'Now look,' shrieked the manager, his voice an octave higher, 'I've told you once, any more messing about and you're ...'

  'OUT!' we all shouted back.

  The film-show at the Sheffield ABC would start with a raucous sing-song to the music of a Souza march:

  We are the boys and girls,

  Well known as the minors of the ABC,

  And every Saturday we line up

  And see the films we like

  And shout aloud with glee.

  We love to laugh and have a sing-song,

  What a happy crowd are we.

  We're all pals together,

  The minors of the ABC.

  The black and white films would include a cast of brave and gallant heroes: the Lone Ranger and his side-kick, Tonto, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Zorro, Tarzan - all handsome, clean-living, clean-shaven, God-fearing, good-natured heroes who only resorted to violence (and then never to kill) as a very last resort. I liked Flash Gordon the best. Each thrilling episode would finish just as our hero was about to be crushed to death or blown up or zapped with a death ray. 'Will Flash Gordon escape?' came the zig-zagged letters across the screen. Of course I knew he would, he always did, but I couldn't wait until the next episode.

  During one performance I was gripped by my collar and heaved out of my seat by the manager, charged with skimming the top of an ice cream carton. I had been guilty of throwing things in the past, but on this occasion I was innocent of the crime and felt the unfairness of the accusation deeply.

  'It wasn't me!' I protested.

  'Out!' the manager ordered.

  'I didn't do it!'

  'I saw you.'

  'How could you see me in the dark?' I argued.

  'Out or I'm stopping the film,' he threatened.

  This was guaranteed to rally support for him from all the children in the cinema, for the last thing they wanted was an interruption to Flash Gordon. There was no camaraderie there. They all started the chant, 'Out! Out! Out!'

  I stamped for the exit unaccompanied by my valued friends, who I imagined would come to my support or at the very least leave with me in protest. I learnt early on that friends will only go so far.

  I told my father when I got home. 'It's not fair,' I grumbled.

  'Life's not fair,' he replied.

  'Are you going to see the manager and tell him?' I asked.

  'Tell him?'

  'Tell him it wasn't me and get my money back.'

  It was one of the few occasions when I remember getting angry with my father. He threw his head back and laughed. 'I've got better things to do on a Saturday morning than traipse down to the cinema. Put it down to experience.'

  The following week, masked by Jimmy and Terry, I managed to evade the manager's eagle-eyed scrutiny of the children filing past him but gave him an evil look as I passed.

  In the late 1940s the Ealing Studios produced a series of films, such as Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets, which became massively popular. They were typified by their restrained humour and gentle tolerance. Then there was a series of films centred on the good-hearted but accident-prone Norman Wisdom, the gormless George Formby, and the 'Lancashire lass with the big voice and large heart', Gracie Fields, which depicted the working class in an affectionate but patronizing manner. None of these interested me. They left little to the imagination. I loved films, particularly the flamboyant and daring adventures that came across the Atlantic. 'Movies,' said Alfred Hitchcock, 'are just like real life with all the dull parts taken out.' This is what made the films so interesting. There was Gregory Peck as the noble and heroic Captain Horatio Hornblower, in the sprawling swashbuckler adapted from the C. S. Forester books, who sails on a secret mission to deliver weapons to the treacherous and bloodthirsty Spanish rebel, El Supremo. There was Errol Flynn as the notorious Captain Blood and Margaret Lockwood as the scheming Lady Barbara Skelton, the wicked lady of the title who takes to highway robbery, prissy Cary Grant as the stiff-upper-lipped British officer, and Frank Sinatra, wonderfully miscast as the Spanish guerrilla fighter who, with a band of motley freedom fighters, drags a massive cannon across Spain in 1810 to blow up the French stronghold. Then there were Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis in The Black Shield of Falworth, complete with Ye Merrie Olde Englande backdrop and ridiculous Brooklyn accents, intent on saving Henry IV from a fate worse than
death. My favourite was The Adventures of Robin Hood, in which the flamboyant Errol Flynn has a splendid showdown with the villainous Basil Rathbone's Sir Guy of Gisbourne. It was all stirring stuff, where goodness, honesty, integrity and compassion were rewarded in the end and evil got its just desserts.

  It was to the Tivoli Cinema that I took Brenda. She was my very first date. I was fifteen and I met her through my friend Peter. He was 'walking out' with a strikingly pretty dark-haired girl called Lynne, and she had this friend, a small, round-faced strawberry blonde called Brenda. I agreed to meet Brenda in the Ring o' Bells Cafe in Rotherham town centre, next to the parish church, and go to the cinema.

  I spent a good hour getting ready, scrubbing my face until it shone, covering up the two angry red spots with some of my mother's flesh-coloured face powder, brushing my teeth violently, slicking my hair with Brylcreem, splashing my brother's after-shave liberally over my face and body, changing my shirt umpteen times, squeezing into tight drainpipe trousers and polishing my winkle-pickers to a high shine. When I looked in the bathroom mirror I thought I looked quite presentable.

  Brenda sat in the corner of the cafe, dressed in a shocking pink knitted cardigan and wearing sensible brown sandals and white ankle socks.

  'Hello,' I said brightly.

  'Hello,' she replied. There was no trace of a smile.

  'Want a drink?' I asked.

  'Milkshake,' she said. 'Strawberry. Large one.'

  This is going to be an expensive evening, I thought to myself, mentally counting the money in my pocket.

  'I thought we'd go to the pictures,' I told her as she took a gulp of the milkshake, leaving a pink moustache above her lips.

  'OK,' she said.

  'Do you like films?' I asked.

  'Depends.'

  'It's science fiction.'

  'I don't like science fiction,' she told me.

  'Do you want to go somewhere else?'

  She sighed. 'No.' She drained the glass. 'Have we time for another milkshake?'