|
The city of Bradford is a large, seemingly sprawling place, boasting a magnificent Town Hall, two train stations, one bus
station, and two "proper" soccer clubs, Bradford City and Bradford Park Avenue. There was also a rugby club, Bradford
Northern, which I now understand to have changed its name to the Bradford Bulls, three marketplaces, two theatres and a few
cinemas, plus an astonishing number of fish and chip shops. and literally countless public houses with some wonderful outlandish
names.
Apart from the inevitable King's Head and Queen's Arms, there were the Barley Mow, the Ancient Foresters, the Snooty Fox,
the Shoulder of Mutton and the George and Dragon. In High Street, Wibsey was a pub called the White Swan, known to one and
all as the Mucky Duck. I still own a drinking licence issued many years ago by the publicans, Mr & Mrs J.A. Tabberer,
as a Christmas gimmick for their customers. It contains this sage advice:
When you SWEAR, swear by your country.
When you STEAL, steal away from bad company.
When you DRINK, drink at the White Swan.
The Buttershaw pub, the Beacon, bore on its wall the sign, "When the floor is full, please use the ashtrays."
When I went back to Bradford a few years ago, I found that many of those favourite old fish shops had gone along with
the times, and were now curry houses, reflecting major changes in ethnic groups in the city. I did notice however, that the
pubs hadn't kept up with the moving times, and were even more numerous than ever, with the names just as outlandish, now including
an improbably named Piste and Siglu Bar.
This melange nestled comfortably amidst a skyline replete with tall smoke-belching chimneys attached to the woollen mills
for which Bradford was famous. The city centre was dominated by the marvellous gothic Town Hall, built of stone, blackened
like all the other buildings, by the years of soot from these mill chimneys. When I was an adult, an attempt was made to
beautify the Town Hall, and sandblasters were brought in to give it a facelift. The exercise left the inhabitants gobsmacked
that such a beautiful building could have been lurking there, hidden from public view. It was magnificent, and made many
of us realise for the first time that our city was black all the way out to the suburbs.
Little Horton was situated about a third of the way up the surrounding hills. This was a working class suburb, though
looking through today's eyes it would be called a slum, with little to recommend it except for its fair share of local watering
holes, and the best fish shops in Bradford.
South Street, my first abode, leading off Southfield Lane, was a short cul-de-sac with houses on one side and a row of
air raid shelters, long since demolished, on the other, with a lumber yard and a pre-school, which we called a nursery, behind
them. On the top corner of the street was a small post office which had its evening newspapers delivered late in the afternoons,
when school was out. The delivery was eagerly awaited by the local kids, who'd fight over the privilege of taking the bundles
of newspapers into the post office, for the reward of a toffee or a humbug. Well, sweets were very rare in my childhood,
and were well worth the risk of pulled hair or a black eye.
Our little back-to-back house was reached from the street through a covered passageway, which we called a ginnel, between
the houses, and consisted of two bedrooms upstairs, with one living room downstairs, and a coal cellar below decks. The kitchen
was a stone sink and a gas ring for cooking on at the head of the cellar stairs. There was no electricity connected to the
houses in the street until years later, the light coming from gas fittings, using gas mantles, which enclosed and enhanced
the gas flame, and which burnt out at fairly regular intervals.
Most of the cooking was done on the huge range in the living room, with a fire in the centre, an oven on one side and
a water tank on the other, all heated by the fire. This fire, of course, had to burn winter and summer, and usually was only
allowed to go out when the chimney needed sweeping.
My first conscious encounter with electricity was with the machine used by the chimney sweep to vacuum the soot from the
chimney. I had heard about electricity, and how it could kill at a touch, so I was terrified of the machine, and because
I was even more terrified of missing anything, I supervised the chimney sweeping from a distance! He may have been using
state-of-the-art technology, but the chimney sweep still looked like a monster from the black lagoon, and smelled wonderfully
of soot. It was considered lucky for a bride to encounter him on her wedding day, but it was most unlikely that he was invited
to kiss the bride in her pristine white gown.
Baths were traditionally taken on Friday nights, in a tin bath on the rug in front of this fire, using hot water ladled
out of the tank. The coal to heat this water was delivered weekly by a coalman to the coal cellar via a chute at street level,
and the collecting of the coal to feed the fire had to be done in pairs, one person with a bucket and shovel, the other with
a candle to light the way. The steps were stone, worn with age, and in winter, damp, so collecting the coal wasn't a job
for the faint hearted, so we kids did it!
We also had the privilege of feeding pennies into the gas meter, also kept in the cellar. Although inconvenient, these
meters, for both gas, and later, electricity, must have been a Godsend to the impoverished tenants, who never had the pleasure
of being faced with a large gas or electricity bill. In those days, the arrival of the meter reader would have been eagerly
awaited, as occasionally there would be surplus coins in the meter, and these were rebated to the consumer.
Kids in those days as well as in these were so convinced of their own immortality that the only things that frightened
us were the spiders that relished the dark conditions of the cellars! This reminds me of the old party game, Postman's Knock.
The local boys always wanted to play Coalman's Knock, as it was dirtier!
Suffice it to say, the toilet conditions were primitive, though I guess we may have been among Little Horton's first yuppies,
as our backyard dunny, unheated and unlit as it was, nevertheless actually flushed! It was reached via a narrow strip of
hardpacked earth across a pocket-handkerchief of a garden where only the long grass and a handful of weeds flourished.
These dunnies, known in those days, as now, as bogs, kahzis, thunder-boxes or shithouses, abutted on a roofed open fronted
edifice, known as a midden, where the noisome rubbish bins eked out a meagre existence, as practically nothing was disposable
in those days. It would have taken weeks to fill a rubbish bin when I was a child if it hadn't been for the ash from the
fires.
The main activity centring on these middens, apart from the disgorging of household surplus into the maws of the forever-hungry
bins, was the use of their roofs as launching pads for the 5 to 15 year old Supermen. They would take to the air with their
cape (a jacket tied by the sleeves around the neck) totally failing to brake their landing speed. The resulting heavy landings
could have supported a local cottage industry in lint, iodine and bandage manufacture!
In some streets, devoid of gardens to break the monotony, these shithouses and middens lined one side of the street, while
the houses faced them. This led to the evolution of shithouse soccer, the object of which appeared to be to get a soccer
ball from one end of the street to the other, scoring a goal on each shithouse door in turn, regardless of any unfortunate
occupants. These loud goals probably cured many an attack of constipation. On the inside, the height of luxury was the toilet
roll, facilities more commonly being a nail on the inside of the door, with neat squares of newspaper hanging from it.
Our Grandparents lived in the same street as us, and living in a front house, didn't have the tiny strip of garden that
we had, so Granddad, being a keen gardener, rented a small allotment from the local council, just a patch of ground with a
greenhouse on it where he could grow fruit, vegetables and flowers. He grew tomatoes, rhubarb, cucumbers, gooseberries, snapdragons,
phlox, pinks, etc.
We used to pretend that the snapdragons were biting our fingers (well, we were very young!), and we loved the taste of
the tomatoes straight from the plants, but we were fascinated by the way Granddad grew rhubarb. He'd pile manure around the
plants, then stick a tin barrel upside down over them, forcing their growth. His rhubarb was the tenderest we ever ate, preferably
raw, peeled and dipped in sugar. We&'d joke that belly buttons were made especially for holding the sugar when eating
rhubarb in bed or for holding the salt for celery!
The relevant word in that last paragraph was "manure". One of my jobs was to follow the rag and bone man's
horse and cart with a brush and shovel! My Granddad paid me 3d a shovelful, big money in those days. The rag and bone man
was a geezer who'd come around the streets (remember Steptoe And Son?) and collect old clothes and rubbish. No matter what
you gave him, the reward was always the same, a poor scraggy goldfish in a plastic bag that rarely survived until his next
visit. If you'd been to Wibsey fair lately, and won a prize, you could have 2 goldfish in a jam jar, dying together!
The only thing stopping us regarding ourselves as totally disadvantaged was that everyone we knew was in the same boat,
and we didn't know that anything better even existed. What you don't know about, you can't yearn for. Apart from the odd
apple or orange, fruit was seldom seen in our street, and I remember my mother using the ultimate put down about a woman whom
she regarded as a snob: "She's so stuck up she even has grapes on the sideboard when nobody's poorly!"
|
