Book 'Innocently Wild'
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All work within 'Innocently Wild' is the work of Andrew Murphy and contains some factual events and anagrams of places.
All copying in part or whole of 'Innocently Wild' is strictly forbidden, as is printing or using any parts for any other kind of use ©
This work has not been proof read by another reader and there are some mistakes in the proper spelling which the spell check may not of picked up on, there may be some other words misplaced, such as cat instead of car. This book needs to be checked over with the spelling where I know there are some mistakes.
'Innocently Wild' written by Andrew Murphy
Chapter 1
Innocence in the Making
John stood as a small child in the corner of an orphanage playground in London while the other children punched, kicked and spat at him. He stood in the corner curled up in to a small ball terrified fight back because he didn’t know how to.
As a five year old boy in 1952 John couldn’t understand why this was happening to him or why the nurses did nothing to stop it. The nurses in the orphanage stood in their crisp white starched uniforms which were spotless, smoking their cigarettes and laughing while they watched the children fighting in the playground.
The tears rolled down John’s cheeks with anger, hurt, and frustration at what was happening to him because this wasn’t the first time that he had been ambushed in the playground by the other children and beaten up. The nurses took a break as they relaxed and watched the children that they were responsible for running wild for an hour. They did the same each day in the playground which was covered in tar and surrounded by high railings to stop the children straying.
Occasionally the nurses would busy themselves by wiping noses and comforting the children when the older stern faced matron who was also in uniform came out of her office to see what was going on. The nurses would douse their cigarettes until the matron had gone back indoors satisfied that all was well in the orphanage playground.
John was born in 1947 and placed in to an orphanage by his mother who had found it impossible to keep him as her son. At this time in life he didn’t understand what was going on around him or why he was there. In the young mind of a child who knew no better, this was his home and the people around him were his family.
The nurses were kept busy making sure that the children in the orphanage were properly dressed, kept clean and well fed every day. They were taught how to wash their faces with their flannels and how to clean their teeth at night before putting on their pyjamas and saying their prayers to go to bed. Often the nurses had to wipe the tears off the little children’s faces who would cry when they got overexcited.
A nurse would sit down and read them a story once they were all tucked up in their beds for the night. The metal beds with wooden lockers beside them stood in a uniform row on the cold grey linoleum which was on the dormitory floor. The children would stare at the shadows on the walls which were painted white while the nurse read out the story loud so that they could all hear what she was saying. When she had finished reading her story she would turn off the dormitory light leaving them to dream and drift off to sleep without a care in the world.
When John reached the age of six the matron told him that he was being transferred to a new orphanage in a place called Pinnacle. She told him that he might be lucky enough to be adopted in that area and that the orphanage was in a far nicer location.
Every child who lived in an orphanage without a family hoped that one day they might be adopted, taken out of the orphanage and given a home with a proper family.
To be taken out of the orphanage by a prospective family was something that every child who lived in an orphanage wished for. If they were lucky enough to be selected they would talk about it excitedly for weeks.
Adoption gave them a chance to show that they could behave themselves properly. Children were always being moved from the orphanage that John was being brought up in. Some because they were to old and others who were lucky enough to have been adopted by families or couples who couldn’t have children.
The nurses at the orphanage in London reassured John who’s case was packed for his journey. He was made ready so that he could be taken to the railway station in an Austin Taxi by a nurse in uniform. They were to be met there by a social worker who was taking him to Pinnacle.
The woman that they met at the railway station in London was a small stocky lady who had glasses, a hat and a two piece tweed suit on. The nurse spoke to her for awhile before handing John and his case over to her in the noisy railway station so that they could begin their journey to Forgehill.
This was the first time that John had been out of the orphanage and he was frightened by the noises of the trains and people shouting. He held on to the social workers hand hard so that he wouldn’t lose her as they walked through the busy station to the platform. The sounds of whistles and trains letting off steam was deafening.
They boarded a train which was standing at the platform waiting to take them on their journey. A whistle blew and there was a piercing shriek as the steam train that they were on started to move slowly out of the station. Wheels sliding as it started to move.
Miss Smith the social worker had picked an empty carriage and John was able to sit at the window and watch the platform disappear as the train started to pick up speed. The trees and bridges flashed past as the train sped along the rails at speed leaving a trail of smoke behind it. Miss Smith had put John’s case on the case rack in the single compartment and was sitting opposite him reading a book while he stared out of the window watching everything that they passed.
Occasionally John would shout excitedly to tell the social worker when they were passing the cows and sheep in the fields. He had only seen them in books before.
John was fast asleep by the time they arrived at the orphanage in Pinnacle by car. It was dark when the train arrived at Forgehill and Miss Smith had lifted him off the train at the station, carried him, and placed him gently in to a Brown Austin Countryman car for the last leg of his journey.
John was wakened by a tall woman who had her hair tied up in a bun. She was dressed in skirt and jacket similar to the one that the social worker was wearing. She told him that she was Miss Bell the matron of the house that he had been taken to at the orphanage, and that she was now responsible for him.
There was a younger woman dressed in an overall standing in the room that they were in. She was told by Miss Bell to take John to the kitchen and get him some food. After that she was to show him where the toilets, the washrooms and his dormitory were.
The woman bent down and picked up John’s suit case before telling him to follow her to the kitchen. She told him that the other children were in their beds and that he would meet them all in the morning.
Jane who was an assistant at the orphanage took John through to the big kitchen and sat him down at a table before bringing him a glass of milk and a sandwich with fish paste on it.
Once he had eaten it and drunk his milk he was taken up stairs to be shown where the toilets and washroom were. There were a number of doors up the stairs which she told John to remember before taking him through a door to his dormitory.
John’s case was placed under an empty bed which he was told was his. He was also given a wooden locker to hang his suit in before going to his bed. As John got ready for his bed he noticed that the dormitory had beds on both sides of the walls with the shapes of people lying sound asleep in them. John who was shy started to get undressed for his bed while Jane checked the other children. Jane waited until John was undressed, in his pyjamas and in his bed before putting the light out and shutting the dormitory door.
Next morning John was wakened by one of the other children who was in the same dormitory him. Robert told John that they had to get up, get washed, get dressed and go down stairs for their breakfast.
John’s new orphanage was like a self contained village. It had eight residential houses with a hospital, school, stores, church, a wash house and a hall. They surrounded the playing fields which were in the middle of the large grounds. Each of the houses was set up as a complete unit with a matron, her assistants and twenty children.
The houses which had all been built the same way had a dining room, kitchen, toilet and a sitting room with a coal fire downstairs. The matrons private room and her office were near the front door of the building. The three dormitories, toilets and washrooms for the children were upstairs with a room for a live in assistant.
It didn’t take John long to get to know the matron, her assistants and the other children who were living in the unit that he had been placed in. Miss Bell was like an old hospital ward sister. She let everyone know that she was in charge of her unit. Everyone had to call her matron. Her job was to make sure that the children in her house were looked after and properly cared for.
She also kept an eye on her assistants who were younger than her. It wasn’t long before John found himself in trouble with Miss Bell the matron of his new home. The children from the orphanage were dressed in their best clothes and taken to a Christmas pantomime in Forgehill with the matrons and assistants from the other units looking after them.
They sat and laughed as the actors performed on stage with their festive production of ‘Old Mother Goose’. During the interval every child from the orphanage was given a tub of ice cream and a carton of orange juice by the actors who came from the back of the stage in their costumes to give them it personally. They laughed, joked and talked to the children before going on stage again.
When the Christmas pantomime was over the children and staff were ushered out of the theatre and transported by bus to a Christmas party which had been arranged in a large hall by the Forgehill fire brigade.
It was an annual event and it was something that the they had done for a number of years as friends of the orphanage. The Christmas party was well organised and everything was done to make sure that the children enjoyed themselves.
The tables around the hall were stacked high with food, drinks and crackers. There was more than enough food for everyone. When the feast was over the tables were moved out of the hall so that the games could begin.
The firemen, their wives and orphanage staff played musical chairs, blind mans buff and pass the parcel with the children who were enjoying their special day out from the orphanage. They were all waiting for the highlight of the night. which was yet to come with the appearance of Santa Clause.
Everyone was going to receive a personal present from Santa Clause when he arrived.
No one saw the three small children disappearing in to the artificial chimney which had been set up in the hall for Santa Clause to appear from. John, Robert and Margaret had got fed up with the games, so they decided to explore around the hall. They had found the artificial fireplace and walked in to the back of it to find a door.
Being explorers they opened the door and found a room full of Christmas presents. They didn’t know that Santa Clause was not a real person, and they had no idea that the presents that they opened up in the room had been wrapped up for all the children who were at the Christmas party. John, Robert and Margaret unwrapped every Christmas present that they saw in their search for a train set.
When someone eventually went in to the room to get the Christmas presents ready for handing out by Santa Clause the damage had already been done. John, Robert and Margaret had opened every present that was in the room.
The party organisers were dumbfounded by what they saw. The three small children were sitting in the middle of the room on the floor with the opened presents all around them in a pile. The organisers had no chance of getting the presents wrapped up again in time for Santa Clause to hand out individually to the rest of the children who were at the Christmas party.
The three children were taken out of the room and returned to Miss Bell who was angry at what they had done. She told them that she would deal with them later when she got them home. The matron didn’t let them out of her sight for the rest of the night.
Miss Bell told the other matrons who were all spinsters what they had done. They stood, stared and pointed at John, Robert and Margaret in disbelief until the party was over and they were taken back to the orphanage by bus.
When they returned to the orphanage later on that night the matron took them in to her office to punish them for what they had done. She put them over her knee and used a slipper before sending them to their beds without any supper in disgrace.
John who had led the other two astray had understood when it was far to late that what he had done was wrong. In their innocence the three children were all disgraced and sent to coventry by the other children who lived at the orphanage.
As the months moved on John found himself getting in to all sorts of mischief. The matron would tell him that he would never be adopted and that no one would want to take someone like him. John was now starting to rebel against her.
Miss Bell had slapped him across the face a number of times for throwing tantrums and shouting at her in temper.
During John’s stay in the orphanage a number of children were confined to the orphanage hospital for a week with the chickenpox. They were sent to the hospital to be quarantined so that they did not spread it on to the other children. As they were getting better they started to play tricks again.
John along with the other children decided to play a joke on the nurse by putting soap and water in a glass and giving it to her to drink. The nurse guessed what they were up to and she said she would only take a drink if they took a sip out of the glass first. The glass was passed around and the children screwed their faces up as they took a sip of what was in it.
They didn’t want the nurse to tell Miss Bell what they had been up to. The nurse took the glass and poured it down the sink when they had all taken a sip out of it, knowing that this was a joke that wouldn’t be repeated by any of them again.
Months went by and John had started to behave himself at the orphanage in the hope that the matron might find a family who would adopt him. Then one day it happened. John was introduced to a couple by the matron.
He was excited that Mr and Mrs Reid wanted a boy and that they were going to take him out of the orphanage and let him live with them for a whole weekend.
Miss Bell warned John that if he didn’t behave himself with Mr and Mrs Reid he would never be given the chance of adoption again.
Miss Bell dressed John in his best suit on the day that the couple were coming to take him to live with them and to see if they wanted to adopt him. He was dressed in his Sunday best which consisted of a white shirt, tie, herringbone suit with short trousers, cap and polished shoes. A small leather suitcase was packed for him by Jane with enough clothes in it to last him for the weekend.
For weeks John had been warned by Miss Bell that if he didn’t behave in the orphanage he wouldn’t be allowed to go and stay with Mr and Mrs Reid. John stayed on his best behaviour for the weeks leading up to his weekend frightened that if he didn’t he wouldn’t go.
As a six year old child John had never lived out of the confines of an orphanage before apart from going to the station when he went to Pinnacle, the Theatre and party at Forgehill which was the nearest large city to the orphanage.
Going to a family house was a totally new experience for John. Mr and Mrs Reid arrived on Saturday at the orphanage in their car to take John home with them to Forgehill.
A car was a form of transport that John had seldom travelled in while he was living in the orphanage and the bumping and shaking of the car throughout the journey made him sick. Mr Reid who was driving the square shaped Black Triumph Mayflower car had to stop it a number of times on route to their house so that he could clean it out.
When the car arrived in Forgehill John got out of the car so that he could go in to the couples house. Mr and Mrs Reid’s house was above a small sweet shop and to get in to their house they had to go through the shop and walk up the stairs.
John’s suitcase was put in the room that he was staying in for the weekend. It had a bed, sideboard, a chair, carpet and it had wallpaper with flowers on it. He went over and touched the flowers to see if they were real. Being brought up in the orphanage from birth, John had always slept in a gloss painted dormitory with linoleum on the floor.
Mr and Mrs Reid were a middle aged couple who had no children of their own. They had taken a number of children out of the orphanage to stay with them for weekends. But they had never found the right one yet.
John hoped that he would be able to impress the couple who had a pleasant manner and who wanted to make John feel at home with them.
Mr and Mrs Reid did their best to try and make John welcome in their house. They took him down to their sweet shop so that they could give him some sweets from the row of jars that were on the shelves.
John stood goggled eyed at all the sweets that were on the counter and on the shelves. He watched and helped Mr Reid serve some of his customers throughout the day. When the shop was shut for the night they all went up stairs so that they could get their tea.
Mrs Reid had prepared a special tea and the table was set for John and Mr Reid to sit down and eat. When the table was cleared, the couple played a board game with John to keep him amused while they listened to the classical music which was on the radio.
Soon it was time for John to go to bed. Mrs Reid tucked him in and told him a story before putting the light out and leaving him. .John was enjoying his weekend out of the orphanage.
Next morning John woke up early to find himself alone in a room for the first time in his life. There were no sounds or movement in the house, so he got up and got himself dressed to find out why. John came out of his room quietly to see if he could find Mr and Mrs Reid who were in their bedroom. He couldn’t find them.
In the orphanage there were always sounds of people moving around in the morning. Miss Bell and Jane would have made sure that everyone was up, washed and dressed in time for breakfast. The orphanage would have been a hive of activity by this time.
John went downstairs as quietly as he could to the shop to see if anyone was there. There wasn’t., he looked up at the jars of sweets on the shelves and bars of chocolate on the counter. Temptation took over. John got some jars of the shelf and sat down on the floor with them. He screwed the lids off and sat eating the sweets while playing with an electrical socket which was on the skirting board.
John switched it off on to keep his other hand busy while he ate sweets from the three different jars. To John this was heaven on its own.
The children living in the orphanage got sixpence a week for their pocket money and out of that they had put something in the bank. Miss Bell didn’t allow the children to eat many sweets. She told them they were bad for their teeth.
John heard a creaking noise up the stair. Mr and Mrs Reid were up and moving around. At that age John didn’t know that most people took a long lie on a Sunday. He made a mad scrambled when he heard the noise and tried to get the jars of sweets back on the shelf before the couple came down the stairs to look for him.
Two of the jars were put back on the shelf where they belonged. The third jar of sweets missed the shelf and came crashing down to the floor before breaking and scattering the sweets in all directions.
The sound of footsteps came rushing down the stairs and John knew that he had been caught. Mr and Mrs Reid were annoyed at him for being in their shop. They gave John a row and warned him that the sweet shop was out of bounds to him if they were not with him.
Mrs Reid took John by his hand and took him up the stairs to give him his breakfast and to let him get washed and get his shoes polished. With it being Sunday they were going to church and they were taking John to the local Sunday school.
They walked down the leafy avenues of Forgehill to the Sunday school and John was introduced to the Sunday teacher. Before Mr and Mrs Reid left him they told him to wait outside the Sunday school until they came back to pick him up. They told John that they might be back a little bit late because the church services were run at a different time.
When the Sunday school was finished John waited on the street for the couple to return and take him home with them. He stood and watched the other children being picked up and taken away by their parents until he was the only person left standing on the pavement waiting to be collected. He stood and looked along the street in both directions eagerly waiting for the couple’s return.
John didn’t know where Mr and Mrs Reid had got to, so he decided to walk back to their house by himself. He tried to retrace his steps by going back the way that they had all gone to the Sunday school.
The route was long and John’s small legs felt as if they had been walking for hours. John walked along different streets and avenues trying to recognise something that he could remember. He saw nothing but the big houses and trees lining the roads and after awhile it became clear to him that he didn’t know where he was going. John was lost and he had no idea what to do now.
A deep sense of fear started to come over him as he worried about what would happen to him next. The tears began flow down his cheeks as he started to cry.
He cried so loud that an elderly lady came out of one of the big houses that was on the road to see what was wrong. When she saw the little boy standing on the street by himself she tried to console him so that she could find out why he was crying. She looked up and down the street to see if there was anyone with him while her sister stood at the window watching.
The woman put her arm around John’s shoulder and asked him what he was doing on the street by himself, she also tried to find out where he had been and where he lived.
John couldn’t tell her where he lived through his tears because he didn’t know. And he couldn’t even remember the couples name.
Eventually the woman manage to calm John down enough so that he could tell her through his tears why he had gone to Sunday school and why he had tried to walk back home by himself.
The elderly woman who had white hair and small round glasses on with a shawl tried to find out what Sunday school John had been to. By this time he was breaking his heart and almost hysterical with the thought that the people who had taken him out of the orphanage to live with them for the weekend had abandoned him for breaking their jar of sweets. He thought he had been left alone in the world again.
John stood in his grey suit with short trousers and polished shoe crying his eyes out. His brown eyes were filled with tears as he stood next to the woman who was worried about him.
The woman’s sister came out of the house to see what was wrong. She suggested that they take John along some of the streets to see if he could recognise the Sunday school that he had been at.
They took him by his hands and walked with him. John felt comforted by the two woman. There were a few Sunday schools in the area and it could have been any one of them as far as he was concerned.
As they walked down one of the streets the couple who John was staying with were coming along in the other direction. They had been looking for him in other areas and they were at the stage where they were going to call the police with worry.
The couple were relieved that he had been found. They thanked the two woman before Mrs Reid took John’s hand to take him home with them. She wiped his nose and dried his tears before setting off. John had given them an fright by going missing the way that he had.
When they got back home to the shop there was another shock was waiting for the couple. The fridge in the shop had stopped working and all the frozen goods in it had melted. Their shop floor was flooded.
Mr Reid immediately called out an engineer to find out what the problem was so that they could get it repaired. Later on that afternoon an engineer arrived in his dark green Morris van with lettering on its side to repair the fridge. He opened his toolbag to get his tools out so that he could see what was wrong.
It didn’t take him long to find out what the problem was. Someone had turned the power off at the socket on the skirting board. Mr Reid made it clear to John that he was not to go near the shop again during the rest of his stay with them. He was banned from the shop altogether.
John’s stay with the couple was over the next day and he was being returned back to the orphanage in the morning.
Things hadn’t worked out for the couple the way that they had wanted and John wasn’t sure if he would be taken out for a weekend by them again.
The next morning the couple got up early so that they could give John his breakfast before starting off on their the journey back to Pinnacle. His case was packed and loaded in to their car before they set off.
John’s very first weekend out of the orphanage was over. Mr Reid had to stop his car a number of times on the way back to the orphanage so that John could be sick. Travelling had made him sick all over the seats of their prized Triumph Mayflower car again.
They arrived back at the orphanage at dinner time and John said his goodbyes to Mr and Mrs Reid before he was told by Miss Bell to go through to the dining room for his dinner. She took the couple in to her office for a chat and to see how the weekend with John had gone.
Later on that the day the matron told John that Mr and Mrs Reid had decided not to take him out of the orphanage with them again. The matron didn’t tell him why.
John was a little bit disappointed at the news that the couple were not going to take him out again, but it was soon forgotten when some of the other children wanted to know what Mr and Mrs Reid were like to stay with. They sat with their mouths open when John told them all about their sweet shop.
The children who hadn’t stayed with Mr and Mrs Reid wanted to know where they had taken him and what they had done over the weekend. John and his friends could talk about nothing else for the rest of the week. He went to the orphanage school and told his teacher that he had been away on holiday and that he was going to buy a sweet shop when he grew up.
The routine for the children in the orphanage was very much the same every day. They would get up in the morning get themselves washed and dressed before going down to the dinning room for breakfast.
Once breakfast was over Jane would check them all over before sending them to their school which was in the orphanage grounds. They stayed at school all day and got their dinners there. When school was over they would all return home to change their clothes with the matron keeping a watchful eye over them.
John had began to settle back down at the orphanage with very little happening for a long time. He had started to behave himself and the matron was getting on quite well with him.
After their tea in the evening they were allowed to play outside for a short time before being called back in to the house. When the children had finished their supper in the evening Miss Bell would take them in to the sitting room and sit them all on the floor so that she could read them a story from the books that she had picked up from the orphanage library.
One day John was told that there was a letter for him. It was the first letter that he had received. He didn’t know what Jane was talking about. when she told him. The matron took John in to her office and told him that a relation of his had contacted the orphanage.
It had emerged that John had some grandparents who were living in Scotland and they had contacted a social worker to see if he could go and live closer to them.
John couldn’t stop taking about his new found relations with his friends at the orphanage for days. He could hardly wait for day that he would meet his grandparents.
Over the next few weeks John received a number of letters from his grandmother. Every time a letter arrived Miss Bell would take John in to her office and let him sit down on a seat while she read the letters out to him.
He was still unable to read joined writing and fully understand what his letters meant. None of the other children living in the orphanage that John was at had never received a letter.
On John’s seventh birthday his grandmother sent him a picture book about a Scottish shepherd and his dog. John undid the string and unwrapped the brown paper parcel wondering what it was in it. It was the first present that hadn’t been given to him by the orphanage.
The other children looked on asking him if they could look at it. John proudly showed them what he had got. He took his prized possession with him and looked after it with loving care.
Miss Bell took John in to her office shortly after he received his book and told him that he was leaving within a month to go and live another orphanage, she went on to tell him that it was near Fennington in Scotland.
This was so that he could be closer to his grandparents. John was excited at the news and he drew a mental picture of what his new found grandparents might look like.
John just knew that he would be going to live near his grandparents and if things worked out well he could be going to stay with them for good.
Almost all of the other children in the orphanage were as excited as John was about this change of fortune. But there were still few of them who tried to put him off by telling him awful stories of what the Scottish people would be like.
John was told that the Scots were all cannibals and that they would eat him because he was an English boy. To his annoyance they would kid him on by reciting the ‘blood of an English man’.
John used to dismiss the other children as being jealous and not having any relations of their own. This would often lead to squabbling with the other children who were slightly jealous at John’s good luck. John would try and hit out in temper before bursting in to tears and running away at the name calling. Miss Bell would normally intervene by giving all the children a row.
John was kept off school the day before he was due to leave Pinnacle while his worldly possessions were packed in to his small suitcase. During the packing he noticed that his treasured book was missing so he went to look for it and find out where it was.
Margaret who had been kept off school because she was sick had taken the book out of John’s possessions and she refused to give him it back. This caused another row.
The matron got angry at the way that John was behaving over his book which he had kept close to him. In temper she took his book, tore it in half and threw it in to the dustbin.
John who was hurt at his book being torn up started shouting at the matron for tearing his book up.
Miss Bell who was fed up with his tantrums took John down to her office and put him over her knee to punish him. When he had received his punishment he was sent to his dormitory with tears in his eyes and confined to his bed until it was tea time. He pulled the blankets over his head to sulk.
This was a punishment that John had received before and it was the one that hurt him the most. Later on in the afternoon John could hear the other children coming back from school. He knew that it was nearly tea time. But John had made his mind up that when someone did come up to tell him to go downstairs for his tea he wouldn’t go.
When the matron sent one of the other children to get John for his tea he kidded on he was sound asleep. He didn’t respond when Anne shook him to get him up. Anne went back downstairs to tell Miss Bell that she couldn’t waken him. Shortly after trying to get him up Anne was sent back to try and waken John again.
John stayed still as if I was sound asleep and refused to move. He heard Anne turning and running down the stairs shouting to the matron that he was dead.
Miss Bell came rushing up the stair and came over to John’s bed to give him a shake and to get him up. John still lay as quite as he could. The matron bent over his bed to see if he was ill or if there was something wrong with him. John suddenly burst in to life and shouted to give her a fright. John got the biggest fright when the matron slapped him hard across his face. John had pushed Miss Bell to far. That night he got no tea and he was told to stay in his bed until the next morning.
The next morning John got up early and was bubbling with excitement of his coming journey in to the unknown.
There was a fair amount of activity and sadness when John did leave orphanage to be moved on in his life. He had grown up for a almost year with the other children in Pinnacle and they had become like brothers and sisters to him even though he was wild and always in trouble. To the other children, he was a likeable little boy in his own way.
John stood at the front door of the house that he had been brought up in with Miss Bell the matron, Jane and the other children who were wishing him well on his journey.
He was almost sure that the matron had a tear in her eye when she gave him a peck on the cheek and waved him goodbye for the last time, finally telling him to be good.
John was taken to the train station and put on a train with a social worker who had come down especially from the city of Fennington to collect him. She had been assigned to take him on his long journey to Scotland. John was bubbling over with excitement at the thought that he was now starting to get a little bit closer to the grandparents that he had never seen.
It was dark and he was sound asleep on the train when it pulled in to the station at Fennington. The social worker woke John up to get him off the train and in to a Pale Green Humber Hawk car which took them to his new orphanage.
John looked out of the car window with sleep in his eyes hoping that he could see where he was going.
When they arrived at Epington House which was a big house set in its own grounds John was introduce to Mr Mitchell the warden who gave him something to eat before showing him the dormitory that he would be sleeping in.
It was late and the other children were fast asleep in their beds. It had been a long and tiring day and when John went to his bed he soon fell fast asleep in his new surroundings.
In the morning John was wakened by the sounds of the other children who were starting to get up and get dressed for the beginning of another day. While John was getting dressed he looked around the dormitory to see the faces of the children that he would now be living with.
When he had washed and dressed himself he was taken down to the dining room by Peggy a girl who introduce him to the rest of the children who were living there.
At first John found it hard to make out what the other children in the orphanage were saying to him. They had a different accent from the one that he had heard in England all his life.
His first few days at the orphanage near Fennington were taken up answering questions from the other children. They wanted know where John had come from and what the orphanage that he had come from had been like.
John was shown around his new home which was a large house set out in it own grounds. To John it was like being out in the country. There were no other house near it.
The ages of the children who were in the orphanage ranged from six to fifteen and most of them had come from the West Coast of Scotland. Some of the other children did have parents, but they had been placed in the orphanage for other reasons.
Mr Mitchell who had ginger hair and a beard run the orphanage with his staff and wasn’t as old fashioned as the matron who had run the last orphanage that John had been in.
The warden did his best to make everyone feel at home and to make sure that the staff were there to help them in any way that they could.
Mr Mitchell took John in to his office and told him that he would eventually be going to stay with his grandparents for a weekend That would happen when he had settled in to his new surroundings and when things could be properly arranged with his grandparents.
Living in the new orphanage was not without its problem. John ended up in a number of fights for being English and for the way that he spoke. He still had a broad regional accent which some of the other children found impossible to make out. If anything, John had become good at running which was what he would do when he was being chased by the older children for being cheeky to them.
The school that John went to was outside the orphanage grounds and him and the other children had to walk down a country lane to get to it.
He had settled in to his class at school and was starting to get on with his work. Deep down John knew that wouldn’t be at the school for very long. His heart was set on going to stay with the only real relations that he had in the world.
He had already built his own mental picture of them and John would sit and tell the other children all about grandparents. It all came from the world of make believe.
John had been told that his mother and father had been killed in a car crash and that’s why he had been placed in to the orphanage from birth. None of the staff in any of the orphanages had ever been able to answer his inquisitive questions when he had asked them about his parents.
John had wanted to know what they had looked like and if they had loved him before they died. These were the type of awkward questions that no one could give John proper answers on.
Eventually the day came when Mr Mitchell called John in to his office to tell him that his grandmother was coming through to Epington House, the orphanage to collect him. He was told that he was going to stay with his grandparents for a weekend in a place called Quarrybell. John burst in to tears with emotional excitement at the thought that he was going to live in a real house with his own family.
Mr Mitchell told John that he was only going to stay with his grandparents for a weekend to begin with but if things went well he could be going to stay with them for good.
The day came when John’s grandmother was coming to the orphanage to pick him up so that he could get to know his grandparents. Billy one of the other children at the orphanage was sent to tell John that his grandmother was waiting for him in the wardens office. He went to Mr Mitchell’s office and saw an elderly woman sitting on a seat.
The other children in the orphanage were walking past the door and looking in deliberately to see what John’s grandmother looked like.
John’s first impression of his grandmother was that she looked quite old. Her face had a lot of wrinkles and she was wearing a pair of glasses that she appeared to be looking over. She had white hair and was wearing a beret with a blue wool coat. His grandmother also had a leather message bag with her. The warden introduced John to his grandmother as Mrs Anderson and told him to sit down.
During a conversation with John’s grandmother Mr Mitchell warned her that he was a little bit wild and that he would need an eye kept on him for his own sake. John had become shy and didn’t know how to speak to his grandmother when she asked him where his case was.
The other children had gathered outside the orphanage to watch John and his grandmother go down the drive to the big gates and past the stone wall which surrounded the orphanage grounds.
Chapter 2
The Realities of Life
John gripped his grandmothers hand tightly as they walked down the road. His grandparents had found him and he had no intention of letting them go now as he looked up at her.
John was nervous at being with a relation for the first time in his life. He felt that he wanted to pinch himself just to make sure that it wasn’t just a dream. John and his grandmother got a number of buses so that they could go to the village of Quarrybell. They got a bus to the centre of Fennington and another one to Tronbridge.
John still couldn’t get used to travelling on the different kinds of transport. It made him sick and he even felt ill even at the thought of having to travel on a bus.
His grandmother had to give him a paper bag to be sick in when he was sick on the single decker bus which was swaying from side to side on the road to the city of Tronbridge.
Mrs Anderson took John to Tronbridge on her route back to the village of Quarrybell. This was so that she could pick some papers up from the house that they had in the city. John’s grandparents kept a house in the city while they were working in the country.
John’s first sights of Tronbridge were breathtaking as he walked from the bus station to his grandmothers house. The streets were so wide and the buildings so tall. John looked up making himself dizzy when he did so.
He held hard on to his grandmothers hand while he Iooked around him trying to take it all in. John felt so small in the city which seemed to be so big and noisy with trams, buses, cars and people going in all directions.
The city was a frightening sight to someone who had never been in a large city before. John was quite a shy little boy who was thin and small for his age. He didn’t find it easy to make conversation with his grandmother who he had wanted to say so much too. But being beside her was enough to comfort him and to make him feel more secure than he had ever felt in his life before.
Everything seemed to be going very fast for John as him and his grandmother went to their city house in Ashworth Street to pick up the papers that she had come for. It wasn’t long before they were on the bus again travelling on their final journey to Quarrybell.
The bus pulled up at the village of Quarrybell and John and his grandmother got off to walk to the cottage where his grandparents were staying.
The cottage was a mile and half out from the village along a country road. John’s grandfather was working as a gardener for Miss Hamilton who owned the estate. The two roomed cottage with kitchen and bathroom came with the job.
The country road was quite and John and his grandmother saw no traffic on it while they made their way to the cottage. The road that they walked along had fields with cattle and sheep in them, it was also lined with trees, bushes, wire fences and dry stone dykes.
When they arrived at the cottage John’s grandfather was standing outside waiting for them to arrive. He was a big man with a heavy build and white hair. He had a tweed jacket and a hat on and looked a like a farmer. He welcomed John and told him to go in to the house which had a big fire burning in the range. John noticed a leg of ham hanging from the ceiling and asked what it was. His grandfather told him what it was and told him to sit down on a chair in front of the fire while his grandmother went to the kitchen to prepare their tea.
John liked his grandparents who were in their in their sixties. His grandfather tried to draw John out of his shell by talking to him and asking him questions about the orphanages that he had been staying in. He came over all shy and didn’t know what to say.
Mr Anderson told him that he was a retired gardener and that the owner of the estate Miss Hamilton had wanted him to come out of retirement and do some gardening work for her. Something that he was good at.
It didn’t take John’s grandmother long to make their tea and bring it through to them. The table was set and the tea was placed on it. It was a boiled ham salad. John sat at the table beside his grandfather to eat his meal.
Mrs Anderson had worked as a cook in service from a very early age and was a professional cook. The leg of ham that was hanging from the ceiling was the ham that she had used for their tea.
When they had eaten the salad John was given a large slice of cloutie dumpling which she had made especially for his stay with them. John tucked in because he hadn’t had food like this before.
Everything In the orphanage was steamed and tasteless, all the goodness was taken out of it when it was cooked.
When they had finished their tea John’s grandmother cleared the table and washed the dishes so that they could all sit in front of the fire, listen to the radio and talk.
John saw something with fur walking across the cottage floor, arching its back and digging its claws in to the carpet as it went. He hadn’t seen a real cat before. John’s grandparents couldn’t understand why he was frightened when the cat walked across the room and tried to climb on his lap. John told them that he hadn’t had any contact with cats, dogs or other animals in the orphanage.
The only time that he had seen them was when he saw them in a picture books. They tried to reassure him by getting him to touch the cat and to stroke its fur. John got another fright when the cat turned around and scratched him on the hand before running away.
The cottage didn’t have any electricity in it and the lighting was given off by a paraffin lamp which had been lit and placed in the middle of the table. It made the room look warm while the flames of the fire flickered casting a shadow over the walls and ceiling.
John’s grandparents talked to him while they listened to a play which was on the radio. The power for the radio which came from an accumulator.
John was starting to get tired and was yawning. His grandmother showed him where his bedroom was. She lit a lamp with a match and took him through to his room so that he could settle down and go to sleep for the night.
It didn’t take John long to fall asleep with his thoughts, dreams and wishes for the future. He just wanted to stay with his grandparents forever now if they would have him.
It was still dark the next morning when John was awakened by the sounds of tapping on his bedroom window. He got up and pulled the curtain aside to see what was making the noise.
All that he could see in the darkness when he looked out of the window was something with eyes looking in at him. John shouted and ran through to his grandparents room to tell them that there was someone looking at him through his bedroom window.
When his grandparents went through to see what the fuss was all about, the eyes at the window had disappeared. John’s grandfather told him later on that it had been a black crow that had been picking the putty from the window.
John was told that it was nothing to worry about and that the bird was unlikely to come back and do the same again. John and his grandparents were up and dressed now, and his grandmother put on the breakfast.
He sat down at the table and was given a feast of porridge, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, sausages and black pudding to fill him up until lunch time. She told John that they were going to another village to get some shopping later on that the day.
John and his grandmother went to a village called Greenlodge which was a mile and a half on the other side of the estate that his grandfather worked on. When they came to a cross-roads, John’s grandmother showed John where the big house was. She told him a little bit about the people who lived in it.
Two sisters called Hamilton lived in the big house and they were both very rich. They were recluses who didn’t like anyone going near the their house. John was warned by his grandmother that he was never to go up that road because the two sisters were witches. He was terrified when he heard that and moved in closer to his grandmother looking up at her as they walked.
When John and his grandmother arrived at Greenlodge they went in to a shop to get the Sunday papers and some other messages. Mrs Anderson told the woman behind the counter that John was her grandson and that he was staying with her for the weekend. John’s grandmother sounded very proud when she told the woman behind the counter who he was.
John felt as if he really belonged to someone for the first time in his life when his grandmother told the other woman who he was. Mrs Ewing the woman behind the counter gave John a bar of chocolate for nothing when his grandmother told her that he might be going to stay with them permanently.
On the road back to the cottage John’s grandmother asked John if he would really like to leave the orphanage and go to stay with them. John asked her if she meant forever. His grandmother replied by saying “Yes you can come and stay with us forever if you really want too”. John shut his eyes and made a wish.
When they returned to the cottage John was allowed to go outside and play while his grandfather stayed in and read the papers and his grandmother prepared the Sunday lunch.
There was a lot to explore in the country and John started by looking around the outside of the cottage. There were two farms further up the road and at the back of the cottage there was a field with cattle in it. The side of the cottage had a lovely flower garden with plants in it. Mr Anderson had already told John that he would give him a little plot to grow his own flowers in.
The cat was sitting on the path at the back of the cottage when John went over and started to stroke it. He picked it up when it started to purr and took it through the back door of the cottage to the bathroom. John shut the door and filled the bath full of water so that he could give the cat a bath.
When the bath was full he lifted the cat up and dropped it in. John’s grandmother came rushing through to the bathroom quickly when she heard the cat wailing and spitting at him. The cat had jumped out of the bath which was now overflowing and flooding the bathroom floor.
When John’s grandmother opened the bathroom door the cat went flying out with John following closely behind it trying and catch it. When the excitement had died down, it was explained to John by his grandmother that cats didn’t like being put in baths of water. He asked his grandmother why he had to take a bath when the cat didn’t?
John got told that cats didn’t like water and that they kept themselves clean by licking themselves regularly with their tongues. John was still puzzled by the behaviour of his grandmothers cat as he went out to play again. John’s grandfather who was sitting in his armchair laughed at all the commotion and left them both to get on with it.
It was lunch time and they all sat down at the table to eat their lunch. Peace had been restored and something new learned by John. John sat at his grandfather feet that night reading a comic and listening to the Scottish music that was coming from of the radio. They didn’t have a radio at the orphanage so he seldom heard music.
On Monday John said goodbye to his grandfather as he prepared to go back to the orphanage near Fennington with his grandmother. His Grandfather put his hand in to his pocket and handed him a shilling to spend on himself.
When he had been returned John sat at the orphanage window and watched his grandmother walking slowly down the drive until she was out of sight. Sad that she had gone.
A few weeks after he had been returned back to Epington House John was told to go to the wardens office. Mr Mitchell took John in to his office and sat him down on a chair.
The chair was far to big for him and his legs hung over the side hardly touching the floor. The warden told John that he had received a letter from a social worker telling him that he would be going to stay with his grandparents permanently.
John could hardly take in what he was being told. he had to asked Mr Mitchell a number of times if he really did mean forever? Mr Mitchell was happy for John and reassured him that it was for good.
John got off the chair and went around the orphanage excitedly telling all the other children what he had been told.
The few remaining weeks that John spent at the orphanage went fast as he waited for the day that his grandmother would finally come back and take him out of Epington House’s gates forever.
The other children were happy for him and they asked him all sorts of questions on an almost daily basis. They would also ask him how many more days he had to stay with them.
John already had the days counted up and just to make sure that he had got them right he would ask Mr Mitchell and his staff to make sure that he hadn’t missed any.
A small party was held for John by the children and the staff in the orphanage the night before his grandmother was due to come and take him to live with her.
When John left the gates of the orphanage for the last time, Mr Mitchell, his staff and other children waved him goodbye and wished him all the best for the future. John was now determined that would never return to an orphanage again if he could have any say in it. He had now experienced freedom.
When John had settled down in his grandparents cottage he found out that there were other relations in his family. He had an uncle, aunt and cousin who were living in Hightown and he had another uncle living in Tronbridge.
John was delighted that he had some more relations and he was beginning to wonder if he would ever get to meet them or see what they were like.
He was now attending the small village primary school in Quarrybell which only had two classrooms. There were no buses on the route to the school that John went to. He had to walk the mile and a half to and from school by himself every day.
There was only one other house on the country road that he took to his school. He had already met and spoken to the owner of that house who had given him some tomatoes from his greenhouse as he passed his house. He ate them on his way to school.
John’s grandparents had made John welcome and he was well looked after clothed and fed.
During his spare time, John would go out and explore the countryside and the woods which were around the cottage so that he could get the feel of them.
Archie who was one of the boys in his class at school lived on one of the farms that he could see from his cottage. John had already been to visit him and his parents at their cottage.
The summer school holidays were due to start shortly and the children were getting seven weeks off. John’s grandmother asked him if he would like to go and stay with his aunt and uncle in Hightown for a fortnight during the summer holidays. John told her that he would love to go and stay with them even though he hadn’t met them yet.
That night John asked his grandparents in the cottage all the questions that he could think of about his uncle and aunt.
When the holidays started John’s suitcase was packed and he was taken through to Hightown by bus to meet his aunt and uncle. They made him welcome and told him to call them uncle Bill and aunty Jean. They let him see his cousin Terry who was still just a baby.
During his stay in Hightown John’s uncle Bill took him down to the local park to play football with him and his days in Hightown passed by quickly.
John soon got to know some of the local children in Hightown. They had shown him how to ride a two wheel bicycle. At first he had been unable to keep his balance and he kept on falling off the bicycle, but with a little bit of perseverance and help from his new friends, he managed to master the bicycle so that he could ride it by himself.
Half way through his holiday John started to get pains on the right hand side of abdomen. At first they were mild, but as the day moved on the pain started to become worse.
At first his aunty Jean had thought that it was just a little bit of indigestion and that the pain would wear off in its own time. The pain didn’t and his aunty had to call a doctor out to examine him.
It didn’t take long for the doctor to diagnose that John had appendicitis. He was rushed through to the hospital in Tronbridge by ambulance.
The ambulance speeded through the streets with its bell ringing all the way to the city. When John arrived at the hospital he was immediately taken in to the theatre for an emergency operation.
The last thing John remembered when he went in to the hospital was a mask being put over his face. When he woke up he felt a tightness around his waist and he tried to undo what he thought was his belt.
He pulled and tugged at what he though was his belt until he felt it breaking free and slackening off.
A nurse came over and asked John what he was doing. She pulled the blankets off his bed to find it saturated with blood. He was rushed through to the operating theatre again. John had pulled off the bandages and pulled out the stitches that had been used to sew him together after his operation.
When he was sewn up again John spent a fortnight in the hospital and another fortnight in a convalescence home so that he could recuperate and fully regain his strength. He had been ill and his holiday had come to an abrupt end.
It didn’t take John long to start talking and building up his confidence again. Once he was up and running around no one could stop him. The nurses told him that he would need to take it easy for a few weeks. He felt well now and it did him a lot of good running around and talking to the other patients and nurses.
When John was well enough he went back to his grandparents cottage in Quarrybell.
During the rest of his school holidays John ignored what he had been told about taking it easy. He went to his friend Archie’s farm and played in the hay with him. They climbed and jumped off the hay stacks and watched his father working in the fields.
Archies father Rab worked as a farm hand and him and his family lived in a tied cottage which came with the job.
John’s grandfather hadn’t been getting on well with Mr Smyth the owner of that farm because his cows had escaped through a broken fence a number of times, gone in to his garden and eaten his flowers. That had caused friction between John’s grandfather and Mr Smyth.
When john’s grandparents talked to each other at night John would sit and listen quietly to them.
Because of his age John heard conversations that he didn’t fully understand.
His grandfather had been in the first world war and had been in the Royal Flying Corps. John that knew he had something to do with aeroplanes in the war, but he didn’t know what.
He had started his working career as a gardener and he had worked on gardens on estates before the war began. His grandmother had worked in service as a cook and she had become a head cook in a number of big houses for the gentry when she wasn’t bringing up her family.
They had brought their family up by the sea. John’s mother and brothers as children would walk along the beach under a bridge picking up the coins that had been thrown from the trains for good luck. He loved listening to his grandparents talking about their past.
John’s grandfather would sit in his seat, light up his pipe and tell his stories while trying to tune in his radio. They had never given John a hug yet. But then no one ever had.
On the Saturday before the end of his school holidays John’s grandmother asked him if I would like to go down to Greenlodge to get her some messages.
He wanted to and he was given a pound note from her before he made his way along the tree lined road on the estate to get to the village. It didn’t take John long to arrive at the village shop.
By the time he had walked there he had forgotten what he been sent to get.
He spent the sixpence that his grandmother had told him he could spend on himself in Mrs Ewin’s shop and put the rest of the change in his pocket.
John took a walk around the village to see if I could see any of his school friends walking about. The village was busy and there were a lot of people walking along one of the roads. John followed them to see where they were all going.
There was a large fairground in a field. It had side shows, rides and food stalls spread over a large area. John who had only seen a fairground in a picture book walked on to fairground site to see what was going on.
He had no idea what time it was as he wandered around the fairground watching fire eaters, sword swallower’s and stilt walkers trying to entice people in to their shows.
John was taken in by the sounds of loud music coming from the fairground rides and the people from the side shows shouting at the top of their voices at everyone who went by.
As it started to get dark the flames from the fire eaters were starting to light up the dark night sky.
The lights on the fairground rides and side shows mesmerised him.
The road in to the fairground was lit by paraffin torches which were constantly being replaced to light up the field and let people see where they were going.
John stood outside the side shows watching the demonstrations that the showmen were putting on before shouting at the people to go in to their tents and see the full show. John went in to a couple of side shows and spent some of his grandmothers money.
He didn’t realise how much he had spent until he put his hand in his pocket and found that there was no money left. John didn’t know what he was going to tell his grandparents when he got back home.
The little boy continued to wander around the fairground site on his own putting any worries that he may have had to the back of his mind. He had no idea what time it was when he left the fairground, but he did know it was late.
He wasn’t sure what his grandparents reaction would be when he got home. He tried to think of an excuse.
Eventually John left the fairground to go back home and he started to walk up the dark country road wondering how he could explain spending his grandmothers money.
The road that he walked up had no lights and the owls hooting in trees and the cows moving about in the fields were making him nervous.
When John reached the cottage he turned the door handle and walked in not knowing what to expect.
His grandfather never even gave him a chance to explain where he had been or what he had been doing. He grabbed John by his arm and took a belt that he had lying on his seat across his backside.
John’s grandfather shouted and swore at him in a loud and frightening voice. He belted John over and over again as he tried to dodge the blows from his belt.
The little boy was defenceless and he could do nothing but accept the punishment that he was getting and which seemed to go on for a long time.
John was dragged through to his bedroom and belted again before he was left and told to go to his bed. The tears rolled down face at the thought that his grandfather had hit him in the way that he had. John had never been beaten as hard as this even though he had been sometimes been a little bit wild.
John cried himself to sleep that night and he was still sobbing in the morning with pain when he got up for his breakfast.
His grandfather had gone out by the time he got up. Something that he didn’t normally do on a Sunday morning. John was confined to the cottage that day by his grandmother who told him that he was not being allowed to go any further than the path at the back of the cottage.
Later on in the morning John ventured out the back door of the cottage to get some fresh air and to have a look at the cows in the field. They sometimes came close to the door at the back of cottage.
The cat was sitting on the wall looking in to the field when John picked it up and bit in to its back with his teeth. He shook the cat around wildly by the fur on its back while still holding on to it with his teeth.
Robbie the cat made loud howling noises and started spitting while trying to turn around to scratch him.
Eventually John let the cat go because he couldn’t hold on to it any longer with his teeth. John’s grandmother heard the commotion and came running out to the back of the cottage to see what was happening.
The cat flew in to the cottage with John running closely behind it. Out of breath and excitedly he told his grandmother that he had seen a dog lifting the cat up and trying to take it away.
John’s grandmother asked him what kind of dog it had been that had tried to take the cat away.
He had a picture in his head of one that he had seen in a picture book.
John told her that it had been a big brown dog with a bushy tail and that it had grabbed the cat by the back and tried to take it up the field in to the woods which run up the cows field.
His grandmother told him that it must have been a fox by the description that he had given her. John had not known that there were foxes in the area that they were living in and that they would try to take and eat a cat. He was worried in case one would eat him.
The story that a fox had tormented the cat was accepted and grandmother said no more about it.
John had returned to his primary school and the beating that he had received was put behind him.
Over the next few months things went well as he explored the countryside around him during his spare time.
When there was rain with thunder and lightning John would sit at the window of the cottage looking out and watching the lightning running along the wire fences. The stoats and weasels would jump in and out of holes in the dry stone dykes.
When the weather was like that John would stay very close to his grandparents because he was terrified of the sound of thunder which would roll across the skies with a deafening roar. It comforted him to know that there was someone else in the room with him during a storm.
It was a wet windy miserable day when John’s grandparents told him to go along to the quarry with some rubbish that had accumulated in the cottage.
This was something that his grandfather would normally do when he went to work in the gardens of the big house.
John set out to walk along to the quarry which was close to the big house where the Hamilton recluses lived. He had never been along that far before and his grandparents had told him some very strange stories about the women who lived there.
His grandparents had told him that they were witches. He had seen Maggie one of the woman riding through the estate on her white horse one time.
As he got closer to the quarry John was starting to get frightened. A mist had started to fall and it was only letting him see a few yards in front of himself.
He was almost at the quarry when there was a long flash of lightning and a loud roll of thunder. the box of rubbish was dropped behind a fence and John run as fast as he could all the way back to the cottage terrified.
As he ran along the road on the estate a siren started to wail like a banshee over the countryside. The siren was used for the miners working at the pit near the village of Greenlodge to change their shifts.
It went off every day and sometime it sounded louder because of the direction of wind.
John’s imagination was running wild and he began to imagine that he was being chased by witches on horses from the big house.
He run in to the cottage out of breath just as another crack of thunder rolled over the cottage shaking the windows and rolling in to the distance.
John was shaking with fear by the time he arrived back at his grandparents. He was asked if he had thrown the box of rubbish in to the quarry as he had been told to do. He lied by saying he had.
The next day his grandfather had been going to his work in the gardens of the big house on his bicycle when he had noticed the box of rubbish sticking out from behind the fence.
John didn’t know that his grandfather had found the rubbish until he got back home from school happy at his days progress.
When John got home his grandfather cornered him in the room and asked him what he had done with the box of rubbish. John told him that he had taken it and thrown in to the quarry.
His grandfather started shouting at John and called him liar. He tried to lie by saying that someone must have taken the box out of the quarry and put it where his grandfather had found it.
It didn’t work. His grandfather grabbed him in his strong grip and produced his belt so that he could give him a beating.
The beating didn’t last as long as the one John had received for spending their money and he thought he had got off quite lightly this time. He had wanted to please his grandparents so much, he felt that he had let them down this time by lying to them.
He didn’t brood and John carried on as if nothing had happened. A few weeks later there was even more excitement when a passing steam engine had thrown some sparks up and set the woods down the road on fire.
Every man and boy from the village of Quarrybell had come to help put the fire out. Mr Harold the local policeman from Quarrybell came up to John’s grandparents cottage and he asked his grandfather for his help in putting the fire out.
John went along with his grandfather and they were given a beater that looked like a broom to help beat out the flames.
They were there almost all afternoon putting out the fire and John felt as if he was really doing something useful for once.
This was mans work and they had let John and the other boys from the village work alongside them until the fire was out.
When the fire was extinguished the men went down to village pub and they were given a pint for putting the fire out. The boys who had worked along side them were given a glass of lemonade and a packet of crisps.
They were allowed to sit outside Bull’s Head while the men talked and drunk their pints inside the pub.
John walked back to the cottage with his grandfather when the men had finished their pints and left the village pub to go home. His grandfather was more talkative after a pint of beer.
Deep down John felt that his grandfather did have a heart as he talked to him on the way back to the cottage.
John’s grandfather told John that him and his wife had wanted to see that he was brought up properly and that was why they had taken him out of the orphanage. He went on to tell John that his own children hadn’t been in as much trouble as he had been in just recently.
John was dwarfed by his grandfather as he walked close by his side trying to keep in step with him.
John had been getting good reports from the school and Miss Young the teacher who was teaching him had been paying particular attention to his education.
The primary school in the village only had two classrooms. Mr Tait the headmaster of the school taught in one of the classrooms while the Miss Young taught in the other.
Miss Young was a spinster who was in her late fifties. She gave every child in her class her undivided attention. With the classes of the school being small she had the time to go around and help each child individually if they were falling behind or getting stuck with their work.
The school was country school in a close knit community where everyone knew each other. Most of the children who went to the school had parents who lived and worked in the village or on farms in the area.
When they were old enough the children who went to Quarrybell primary school would go on to their secondary school education in North Market which the nearest town.
The teacher that John had at Quarrybell primary school was a teacher who always made sure that the children she was teaching were getting a good start in their education.
Miss Young had known about his background in the orphanage and she had taken him under her wing. She was a small woman with a kind heart.
John enjoyed walking the mile and half to and from his school because it gave him chance to expand his inquisitive mind. He explored the fields and hedgerows as he walked along the country roads.
Sometimes John would go along the main road from Quarrybell to Greenlodge. The main road was a mile and a half. He would then cut a mile across the fields to his grandparents cottage.
As he crossed the fields one day, he found that one of the usual field had been filled with sheep. He needed to do the toilet so he stopped to do it against a wall in the field.
John heard footsteps on the grass behind him and he turned round to find a sheep standing looking at him.
When he turned around quickly and did the toilet in the sheep’s face by mistake he gave it a fright. The sheep took a few steps back and started butting John with its head.
The other sheep in the field saw what was going on, came across and started to do the same. John didn’t know what to do, so he stood where he was too frightened to move. The head butting from the sheep went on for almost half an hour before he managed to get away by climbing over a wall. He was bruised after being knocked about by the sheep.
When he got back home crying he told his grandparents what had made him late. They believed him and his grandmother gave him some warm water to bath the bruises that he received.
November had come and a bonfire was being built on a piece of spare ground in the village of Quarrybell. It was the talk of the school and the village that day and most of the other children were being allowed to go to it. It was an annual event and a fireworks display had been organised for when it was dark.
When John got home from school that day he asked his grandfather if he could down to the village bonfire and watch the fireworks display. He agreed but warned John not to come back late or to go to close to the bonfire and get burnt.
John set off down the road to go to the fireworks display after his tea. He took his time by having a look in the fields as he went.
A quarter of mile down the road there was a bridge with a railway running underneath it. He had often stood there watching the steam trains going under it and getting himself covered in soot and smoke in the process.
As John approached the bridge he noticed that there was a bicycle lying in the grass at the side of the road.
He wondered why the bicycle was lying there because this was a road that very few people used and when anyone did use it they were usually on business.
John walked over to the bicycle and took a look at it to see if I could solve the puzzle of why it was lying there. He looked around and shouted as loud as he could for over ten minutes. John thought that if it had belonged to someone they would have appeared and told him that it was theirs.
He stood and looked at the bicycle convincing himself that it had been dumped and that it no longer no belong to anyone. John lifted the bicycle out of the grass, got on it and started to pedal it down the road to Quarrybell.
The only vehicles to use this road were cars that were going to the farms or the mobile shops which provided a service to the people living in the sparsely populated area.
The road was quite and John took his time going down to the village on his new found transport swaying from one side of the road to the other until he found his balance.
When John arrived at the bonfire site on his new found transport he was asked by the children who were there where he had got the bicycle.
He told them that his grandfather had bought it for his eighth birthday which had been in October.
John cycled around the bonfire site getting lost in the excitement of the fireworks display which was being set up and prepared for when it was dark.
Later on, John got a fright when a workman came running on to the bonfire site shouting that he had stolen his bicycle.
The site which had a lot of people on it went quite. They turned their heads and their eyes focused on to him. John got off the bicycle and tried to make an excuse as to why he had it.
The workman shouted out in a loud voice that he had been working along the railway line and that he had left his bicycle in the grass beside the road. When he had come back his bicycle had gone.
The workman told the people who were standing listening that he had been going down to the village police station to report it stolen.
He took his bicycle back and reassured John that he wouldn’t bother going to police. He had just had been glad to get his bicycle back and he had understood why he had thought it had been dumped.
The workman left the bonfire site with his bicycle and the incident was soon forgotten by the people who were there. John started to help them by getting some wood and stacking it on the bonfire which would be lit later on that night.
He didn’t notice Mr Harold the local policeman walking over towards him with his pet boxer dog.
The policeman walked over to John and told him that Tom the railway workman had reported what had happened to his bicycle. John’s stomach felt as if it had a million butterflies flying about inside it when the policeman told him that he was taking him home to his grandparents cottage.
He walked along the road in front of the policeman and his dog with his head hung in shame. John was afraid of his dog and he kept well in front of it.
As they walked along the road to his grandparents cottage, John noticed that there was a woman walking towards them with a suitcase in her hand. She had arrived at the small village station and was going to the village of Quarrybell.
John carried on walking when she stopped to ask to the policeman for directions. He turned on to the road that took him to his grandparents cottage and carried on walking..
He looked back to see if the policeman and his dog were catching up on him. He couldn’t see him and on impulse he climbed over a wire fence and walked in to the woods. John walked deep in to the woods and sat down beside the railway which run through them believing that he had lost the policeman.
He sat beside the railway lines for what seemed an eternity trying to think of an excuse that he could give to his grandparents when he returned back to the cottage.
He knew that he was in trouble again and he knew what the consequences would be. John was now trying to delay the inevitable.
There was a stillness in the woods and the only sounds that could be heard were the sounds of the birds singing in the trees and crows in the air.
It was peaceful and John almost forgot why he was sitting there. The silence was broken when he felt a hand grab his shoulder from behind. John was terrified when he was lifted up bodily and when a dog started jumping up at him.
Mr Harold the local policeman had caught up with him. He lifted John over his knee and started to punish him by hitting him on his backside with his hand. He was angry that John had tried to escape from him.
John screamed and shouted in protest as the dog started to get excited and jumped up trying to bite him. He was frightened of dogs and with Mr Harold’s dog jumping up at him he became terrified that it would bite his face.
When the policeman had stopped hitting him he put John down so that he could escort him back to his grandparents cottage. John walked along the country road with the policeman walking close behind him to make sure that he didn’t make any more diversions.
As John walked along the road he shook the leg of his short trousers to let out the mess that had happened when the dog was jumping up at him with the excitement. John didn’t know that Mr Harold wouldn’t have let his dog bite him. He had just taken his pet with him for a walk.
They arrived at the cottage and the policeman went in to the house to tell John’s grandparents what had happened. His grandfather already knew the local policeman and they had a cup of tea and started to talk about the things that were going on in the village.
John sat and listened to their conversation as if nothing had happened. The policeman told his grandfather that he had punished him for what he had done and that he didn’t think there was a need for any more.
The local policeman was a young man of twenty five. He was married and lived in the small police house in the village with his wife and baby.
There was very seldom any crime in the village of Quarrybell. When the policeman finished his tea and talking he left the cottage to walk back down to the village bonfire.
John received a sever beating off his grandfather for stealing the bicycle and bringing the police to his door. Next morning when John got up he could hardly sit down for the pain on his back and backside.
When he went through to the toilet to wash himself he lifted the mirror off a shelf and twisted his body round to have a look and see what was causing the pain. His eyes were still sore with crying.
The flesh had been lifted on parts of his back with the sever beating that he had received the night before from his grandfather. His back and backside were multi-coloured with bruises from the beatings that he had received the previous day.
The bruising which had mixture of colours took weeks to go away. John’s grandparents shouted at him for awhile after that reminding him that he done wrong and why he had been punished. John had heard a few home truths while his grandparents had been shouting and swearing at him.
They had let it slip out why he had been sent through to his relations in Hightown during his school holidays.
John was told that his mother was still alive and that her and her husband had been through to visit his grandparents. He had been born out of wedlock and she had put him in to the orphanage as a baby.
When she had had put John in to an orphanage she had worked in London and had got married later on. He had been an unwanted baby.
John’s grandfather shouted in temper that no one had wanted John and that’s why he had ended up with them. John was hurt at what he heard and he told his grandparents that they were lying before running off to go and sit in the woods to think about it.
When John went back to school the next day he had attained the reputation of being a thief and a liar. Things had started to become strained between John and Mr Tait the headmaster.
If anything went missing in the school or if there were any problems in the playground John started to get the blame.
John was sitting thinking one day when he wondered why his grandparents had never taken him anywhere. He had only been to the shops in the village with his grandmother.
He wondered why his grandparents had never taken him for a walk or a picnic in the country like the other children’s parents.
He sat daydreaming about the forester who had been in the woods for a few months in September. He come to chop down some trees that were in the woods close to their cottage.
John had made friends with him and he had let John help him when he was working. He would fell the trees, strip the branches, split the trunks and stack the wood up in piles.
The forester was a rugged man who like the outdoor life and he had been thinking of emigrating to Canada in the future with his wife. He would often come along to John’s grandparents cottage with a bag of logs for them and to have a chat and cup of tea.
The forester had once asked John’s grandparents if he could adopt him so that he could take him to Canada with him and his wife. He told his grandparents that he was a self employed forester and that he had his own business and equipment. He wanted to emigrate to Canada where there was work waiting for him.
He had asked John a few times if he wanted to go and start a new life with him and his wife. When his work in the woods was over he had moved on with his equipment and John had never seen him again.
It was close to Christmas and the snow had started to fall on the countryside covering everything that was visible for miles.
On his road to school John would roll a snowball which would get bigger the further he went. He would roll it until it got so big he couldn’t move it any more. John would leave it in the middle of the road and make his way to school while trying to copy the marks of tractor tyre tracks as he went.
He acted as if he didn’t have a care in the world as he wandered down the country road which had snowdrifts all the way down it.
John had grown fond of the country and he was starting to get to know all the different kinds of birds and animals that lived in it, what kind of clouds were in the sky and what direction that the wind was coming from.
His grandfather had been having continuing problems with his boss and Mr Smyth the farmer . He had heard his grandparents talking about going back to Tronbridge to stay.
John had seen his grandfathers boss Miss Hamilton a number time riding her horse past their cottage. He had never heard them say a good word about her or her sister. They accused them of being mean with their money.
For weeks before Christmas John and the other children at the village school had been getting prepared for the school Christmas party.
They made decorations and hung them up in the classrooms and in the central hall of the school building. This was John’s first Christmas out of the orphanage and he had been looking forward to it.
He still believed in Santa clause, his sledge and reindeers and John had already written him a letter telling him what he wanted.
On the day of the Christmas party, John’s grandmother gave him his suit and made sure that he was properly turned out for the occasion. Mr Tait the headmaster had told the children that they would be doing schoolwork in the morning and that the party would be held in the schools central hall in the afternoon.
The parents from the village had made up the food and they were going to the school to prepare the tables and chairs for the party at lunch time.
During the morning break the children were given their bottles of milk to drink and told to go outside and play in the snow so that they could get some fresh air and burn off some of their energy.
The children made snowballs and threw them at each other. They played in the snow until Mr Tait came out and rung the brass school bell that he always rang for them to go back in to school.
When John went back to his classroom Miss Young his teacher started to read the children a Christmas story.
There was silence in the classroom as Miss Young read them a story about the baby Jesus and the manger.
John and the other children sat quietly with their mouths open as she told them about the star of Bethlehem and the three wise men.
There was a knock at the door. Miss Young opened it to find the Mr Tait the headmaster standing on the other side of it. He looked over at John while he spoke quietly with his teacher.
Miss Young turned round and told John to go with the headmaster. He got up from his wooden desk and went out of the classroom with him.
Outside the classroom the headmaster handed John a bucket of water, a scrubbing brush and a cloth.
He took him to one of the outside walls of the school which had been written on with chalk. John told the headmaster that he hadn’t written on the school wall and that he didn’t see why he should clean off someone else’s writing.
Mr Tait’s face went red with anger. He told John that he would clean off the wall if it was the last thing he did.
Mr Tait stood over John while he put water on the wall with the cloth and started to scrub it to remove the writing which came off easily.
The headmaster was a small man with round glasses in his late fifties. His grey black hair was greased back and he always wore a pinstriped brown suit which smelled of mothballs. He lived locally in the village with his wife and was a pillar of society.
When John had completed the task that he had been given by Mr Tait he was taken back in to the school to empty his bucket of water down a sink. He put the scrubbing brush, cloth and the galvanised steel bucket in to the cupboard that the headmaster had taken them from.
When he had done what he was told, John asked if he could return back to his classroom to hear the rest of the story that his teacher had been telling him about baby Jesus and the three wise men.
He realised that his punishment wasn’t over when Mr Tait abruptly told him to stand where he was while he went in to his classroom. Mr Tait returned from his classroom with a strap in his hand
John was told to hold his hands out while the headmaster punished him. He held his hands out while Mr Tait lifted his belt high in to the air and brought it down hard on his hands. He did this six times before telling John to wash his face, dry his eyes and return back to his classroom until it was time for the Christmas party.
Before John left Mr Tait told him that he wanted to see him before the Christmas party started.
When John returned back to his classroom Miss Young had finished telling her story and the other children were packing up to get ready for the lunch break. The classroom went quite when John walked back in.
Miss Young his teacher told the children that they could go outside and play until it was time for the party to begin.
The children who lived close to the school went home to get changed.
Just before the party was due to begin. John did as he was told and went in to the school before the Christmas party to see Mr Tait who was sitting reading at his desk in his classroom.
When the headmaster saw John he told him to follow him to a stationary cupboard which was in the central hall of the school.
As they walked to the cupboard, John could see the tables being set up with food for the party.
Mr Tait told John to go in to the cupboard. When he went in Mr Tait shut the door behind him and locked it. John heard his footsteps walking back to his classroom. He knocked on the door to get out. But no one came and opened it. John burst in to tears and sat on the floor wondering what he had done so wrong.
Shortly after being put in the cupboard John heard the other children coming in to the school and sitting down as the party was about to begin. He knocked on the door to try and attract someone’s attention and to get out. No one came.
John was kept in the cupboard for the duration of the party. He could hear the other children eating their food, playing their games and shouting. He heard the cheering of the other children when Santa clause arrived. John sat on the floor broken hearted crying his eyes out.
Some of other children would occasionally knock the door deliberately to torment him.
Mr Tait the headmaster opened the door and let John out of the cupboard when the Christmas party was all over. He told John that he would have to start behaving himself.
John was told that he had been put in the cupboard as a punishment for being cheeky when Mr Tait had told him to remove the writing from the wall.
It was dark when John left the school to make his way home and it had started to snow again.
He was hungry because he hadn’t had anything to eat since morning. He just wanted to go home now.
Mr Smyth who’s farm was close to John’s grandparents cottage came to the school to pick up Archie his farmhands son in his Maroon Buckland Tourer car and to take him home.
Archie asked Mr Smyth if he could give John a lift to his grandparents cottage. The farmer told him that there was wasn’t any room in his car for him and that he would have to make his own way home.
John walked up the road as the snow started to fall heavily making it even deeper than what it had been before. He was relieved when he walked up the road knowing that he wouldn’t have to go back to school for another fortnight.
John made his way through the snow to his grandparents cottage on the country road which still hadn’t been cleared with the snowploughs. When he got home his grandparents asked him if he had enjoyed his Christmas party at school.
He didn’t tell them what the headmaster had done to him, but he did tell him about Mr Smyth not giving him a lift home in his car which did have room for him.
They told John not to worry about it because they would be moving to a another village shortly after the New year. John’s grandfather had been getting restless working on the estate and he had wanted to give his job up and move on to something else.
School was over now until after the Christmas break and John would go outside cottage and play in the snow. Sometimes he would go to Greenlodge with his grandmother to help her carry her messages.
His grandmother was starting to build up extra food to see them through the Christmas and New Year. John’s grandmother was always complaining about the mobile shops which came to the cottages and farms. She complain that they were far too expensive.
Greenlodge only had five shops in it and John’s grandmother was limited to what she could get there. She would take him through to Hightown by bus when she was buying him shoes, boots, clothes or anything else that she couldn’t get in the village.
John was looking forward for his first Christmas with his grandparents. On Christmas eve he hung his stocking on the end of his bed for Santa to fill with presents.
His grandparents didn’t hang Christmas decorations up for the festive season, but they did display the cards that they had received on their sideboard.
On Christmas eve John was allowed to stay up a little bit later so that he could listen to the Christmas Carols on the radio with his grandparents. They sat in front of the big fire which had been stacked up high with wood to keep out the winter cold.
John went to his bed excited that Santa clause would be coming to give him his Christmas presents. He tried to stay awake to see Santa clause but tiredness got the better of him as he drifted off to sleep.
When John got up in the morning there were a number a parcels lying at the bottom of his bed with his name on them. He could see by the sizes of parcels that he hadn’t received the bicycle that he had asked for.
He started to unwrap his present to reveal a pair of cap guns with a belt and a holster, an encyclopaedia, a wind up tin penguin that walked, and a stocking with some chocolate bars in it.
John was delighted at what he had received and he went through to show his presents to his grandparents. John got a present from his grandparents and another two that had been sent to by his uncles.
He opened the present that he had received from his grandparents to find a pencil case with pencils, crayons, a rubber, colouring books, socks and some money. He thanked his grandparents before opening the other two presents that he had received.
After the wrapping paper had been cleared away his grandmother gave them their breakfast before telling John that he could go outside and play with the cap guns that he had received. His grandfather sat glued to radio while his grandmother prepared a Christmas lunch.
The caps in John’s toy guns didn’t last long as he fired them off in to the stillness of the countryside. There was nothing moving around in the country on Christmas day apart from the birds which were flying about in the sky.
John played inside and outside the cottage all day with the gifts that he received from his relations for Christmas He was bubbling over with joy. He had never felt so happy before.
They had a Christmas dinner of Scotch broth, roast lamb with vegetables, and a sherry trifle that was fit for a king before they all settled down to listen to the radio in front of the fire.
The festive season passed by quickly and it wasn’t long before John was starting to make his way back to the village school.
John kept out of trouble and started concentrating on his school work.
He went out of the cottage one morning to find a cow chewing away in his grandfather’s garden and eating everything that was in sight. The cow had escaped from the field behind his grandparents cottage and it was on the loose.
He run in to the cottage to tell his grandfather that there was a cow in his garden and that it was eating everything in it. His grandfather stormed out of the cottage and chased the cow in to a kail field across the road.
The kail field belonged to Mr Smyth the farmer that he hadn’t been getting on with. The cow didn’t. It belonged to another farm.
The cow stayed in the kail field all day eating what it could before it was discovered. John’s grandfather told Mr Smyth and his farmhand Rab when they came to remove it that it was him that had put it there. That caused all sorts of problems.
Mr Smyth had threatened to send John’s grandfather a bill for the damaged to the kail in his field. John’s grandfather laughed at this and told him to send the bill to Mr Liddell the farmer who the cow belonged to.
Shortly after the year they were packed and ready to leave the village of Quarrybell. John’s grandmother had organised a removal van to take them to the village of Newmill.
The removal van came and all the furniture from the cottage was loaded in to it. John and his grandfather helped the removal men take out the small items and boxes while his grandmother made sure that nothing had been left behind.
They took a long look at the cottage behind them before getting in to the removal van to set off on their journey. John’s grandmother got in to front of the removal van with the driver while the two removal men and John sat in the back with his grandfather. John looked after the Robbie the cat which was in a basket.
it wasn’t long before they had moved in to village of Newmill and were living in a farm cottage. There was a row of cottages together and the furniture had all been sorted out.
John’s grandfather had gone to work for Murray the farmer as a gardener. It didn’t take John long to adapt to his new surroundings, but deep down his grandparents weren’t happy staying where they were. John’s grandfather felt that Murray who he was working for had lied to him.
The garden that he was working on had hardly existed and John’s grandfather had been expected to create it from scratch.
He had heard his grandfather telling his grandmother that he had worked as head gardener in some of the best gardens in Scotland and he never seen a garden like the one he was working on. He hadn’t been happy at the work that was involved because his age was now against him.
John was sitting in the cottage with his grandparents one Saturday when there was a knock at the door.
His grandmother opened the door and called John’s grandfather who in turned called on John to go to the front door. There was a man at the door with a bicycle.
John’s grandfather told John to get on it and cycle it down the road. It was a bit big for him and he swayed from side to side while pedalling down the road on his short run.
When he returned his grandfather asked the man in to the cottage and gave him some money. They had bought John a second hand bike. When the man left, John’s grandfather took the bicycle and adjusted the seat and the handle bars for him.
It was an upright Raleigh bicycle with straight handlebars and a crossbar which was ideal for John. He was now able to explore the countryside that he was living in with his bicycle.
When his grandparents needed anything from the shop which was at Fieldhouse was sent on his bicycle to get it.
John was now able to keep his balance on his bicycle and he had become quite good at cycling.
One Sunday he was sent to Fieldhouse to get his grandparents Sunday papers. To get there he had off his bicycle and push it up a steep hill to get to the village. John bought some sweets in the village while he was there before returning back on the road that he had come.
When he was returning from Fieldhouse he came down the hill taking the left hand bend to fast. The bicycle hit a kerb and John came flying off his bicycle hitting his chin off the pavement. He hit the pavement with his chin a number of times before lying doubled up on the pavement at the side of the road.
He was in pain with his fall and the blood was pouring from his chin which he had scraped along the pavement when he had come off his bicycle.
John managed to lift his bicycle which was lying a few yards behind him. He walked back to the cottage while holding his handkerchief on his chin.
When John arrived back at the cottage his grandmother took him through to the bathroom so that she could bath his chin and stop the blood long enough to put a sticking plaster on it.
John’s grandfather told him that he had learnt a important lesson by coming off his bicycle the way that he had. He took John’s bicycle to check it and to see if it had been damaged.
John’s grandfather was starting to get restless again. His grandparents had been talking about going back to Tronbridge to stay for good.
John had now started to realise that his grandfather was to old to be working. His word had always been final in the house and any decisions that were made were made by him.
His grandmother hadn’t worked in service for a long time. She was always in the cottage preparing the food and keeping it clean. John’s grandmother only went out when she needed messages or if she was taking him for clothes or the doctor.
On Saturdays John would go round to the farmyard and help Murray the farmer do any small tasks that were needing done for a small amount of money.
One Saturday John was helping Murray and his farmhands to move some cattle through the farmyard to their sheds. When they had been moved Murray suggested to his farmhands that they move the white bull to another field.
John was terrified of the creature which was massive and was always charging through the field bellowing and snorting while digging the ground with its hoofs. It had a bad reputation and it was a beast that even Murray and his farmhands were cautious of.
The villagers were frightened that on day it would escape from its field and kill someone. They gave the field a wide berth.
The farmhands and John were all given their positions along the route that the bull was going to be taken to its new field. John was given his position in the farmyard. He was told to stand and wave his arms so that the bull would go along to the next farmhand who was a few yards along from him.
When he saw the bull coming round the corner towards him snorting and swaying from side to side he took to his heels and run.
The size of the animal was a frightening sight as it kept dipping it head as if to ram something or someone with its horns.
With John not being there the bull took its cue to escape. It turned and started to run back the way it had come. The other farmhands who were walking in to the farmyard praising themselves for a job well done were confronted by the massive bull which had no intentions of stopping now that it had regained its freedom.
John went home and told his grandfather what had happened. It touched John’s grandfathers sense of humour. He laughed and told John not to bother about it. John was told to stay in the cottage until the bull been caught and put back in to its field by the Murray and his farmhands.
When John went to school on Monday the bull was back in its field. The same field that it was being moved from. Murray didn’t let John work on his farm again.
Shortly after that the bull was found dead in its field. John was passing the field on his way back from school when he saw a lorry with a crane on it lifting the bull to take it away. A number of villagers had gathered to watch the bull being loaded on to the lorry.
They were told that it had died of old age.
Shortly after that John’s grandfather had another row with Murray. He told him that he was leaving his job and going back to Tronbridge to stay.
He had made his mind up to retire for good. He worked out his notice with Murray while John’s grandmother made the arrangement for the move to the city.
Chapter 3
On the Move
John was looking forward to his move to Tronbridge because he had heard so much about it. His grandparents had kept their rented house in the city for twenty years.
John was told that he would like it in the city and that he would make lots of new friends there.
Their house in Tronbridge had been kept on as a base while they worked on the big estates in the country. It was kept so that they would always have somewhere to return to if the job that they were working in didn’t work out to their satisfaction.
John’s grandmother contacted a removal firm and started packing up to get ready for their retirement in the city. John helped by wrapping up the ornaments in newspaper for them and putting them in to cardboard boxes.
The house that they moved to in the city had five rooms and was on the second floor of a tenement building in Ashworth Street.
When they arrived in Tronbridge John’s grandmother told John to remember where he was staying so that he wouldn’t get lost, because he was now living in a large city.
The roads in the country had been narrow and the cottage small in comparison to the streets and houses of the city which he was now a resident in. The uncle that John had staying in Tronbridge had been staying on at his grandparents house while they had been working in the country.
John met his uncle who was a tall sad looking man who’s hair was starting to thin on top.
John’s uncle Frank had his own room at the front of the house and was a bit of a loner.
His grandparents told him that his uncle who was thirty three years old had been a sailor in the second world war and that the ship that he had been on had been torpedoed and sunk.
His uncle Frank had been in the water for days along with other sailors who had drowned. This had left its mark on him and it had effected him badly although he was now working.
John’s grandparents told him that he wasn’t very talkative because he was still recovering from the horrors of the second world war. John felt proud of his uncle for what he had done.
His grandmother took him down to the Earlsridge primary school to introduce him to the headmaster and to make sure that he knew where he was going.
She also showed him what routes to take when he was going to his new school.
John was taken around the area of Earlsridge to show him the streets that he could play in. She also showed him the streets he was not allowed to go near.
They lived in the Earlsridge area of Tronbridge which was a mixed area.
Ashworth Street was a main street on a hill with tenements on both sides of the street. It was also a main tram and bus route. There were four streets that John was not allowed to go near.
He had been told by his grandmother that the people living in them were bad and that they would try and lead him astray. He memorised Hillpark Street, Monument Street, Woodford place and Northbrook Street so that he wouldn’t forget what his grandmother had told him.
Tronbridge had two railway stations, a bus station and a castle which was used by the army for ceremonial duties.
The city had a mixture of industry and banking in it. John settled in to his new area and tried to get to know it day by day. He had watched the trams hurtling down the hill and he had put a coin on the tracks to see what would happen. His coin was flattened beyond all recognition and he found that couldn’t spend it.
Growing up in the city was a totally new experience for John who’s life had been different when he had lived in the orphanages and in the country.
During his first week in Tronbridge John’s grandfather stood beside him and pointed out of the back window to a church steeple. He told John that he would attend the Sunday school at that church every Sunday.
John stretched up and stood on his toes to see if he could see what his grandfather was pointing at.
He made his way to his new school which was different from any of the schools that he had been at before.
The school and classes were bigger and he found it harder to concentrate on his school work. He was glad when his lessons were over at the end of his first day. He had made new friends at his school who lived in the same area as him.
Being the new boy at the school the other children were curious to find out where he had come from and what his name was. He soon introduced himself to the to the other children.
His new friend David asked him if he wanted to go to the pictures with him. He had only heard the other children talking about them when he was living in the orphanage and the country.
John asked his grandmother persistently if he could go to the local picture house with his friend.
She gave him his some money, told him to behave himself, and to return home when the afternoon matinee was over.
The inside of the Grand picture house was full of other children who were shouting, stamping their feet and screaming for the picture to start. John soon joined in the fun and started shouting and throwing paper along with them.
When the lights went out the shouting and stamping suddenly stopped. The picture house went quite and the camera started to roll as the film flickered on to the giant screen.
The picture house which looked as if it had seen better days had a reputation of being a flea pit by the local people.
The first film to be shown that afternoon was a black and white film with Zorro the capped hero.
The film on the screen suddenly broke and the screen went bright with the light from the projector. Someone told John that it had broken down and that the film would be restored in a matter minutes.
The children who were all young started to shout and stamp their feet for the film to come back on again. The usherettes walked up and down the aisles shining their torches along the rows to try and quieten the children down.
When the first film was finished there was a mad rush for the two ice cream ladies who had come to the front of the screen. They had come with their trays to sell ice cream and ice lollies before the next film began.
John’s grandmother had given him enough money to get himself one. He was enjoying being out with his friend and the other children.
The picture house was shrouded in darkness when everyone was back in their seats. The camera started to roll again and a cowboy film flickered in to life.
John had never had so much fun shouting when the good cowboys chased the bad ones. When one was shot there an uproar in the picture house.
At the end of the film all the children stood up and waited until god save the queen had been played. A few children saluted as they stood. The usherettes stood and watched them eagle eyed to make sure that no one moved until the music had stopped.
The usherettes in the picture house kept all the doors shut until the national anthem was over. When they did open the doors to let the children out of the cinema there was a mad rush so that they could all go home for their tea. John and David played being cowboys going along the road shooting each other with their imaginary guns.
When John got home he told his grandparents excitedly about the films that he had seen at the picture house and asked if he could go every week with his new found friends. His grandmother told him that he could go, providing he behaved himself.
On Sunday John’s grandmother prepared him to go to the Sunday school that his grandfather had shown him out of the window. He had been going to the church for a number of weeks and he had enjoyed singing hymns and listening to the stories at bible class.
One Sunday things changed when his Sunday school class were taken to another church.
The service that he went to was a full church service with a minister and choir boys.
It was different from the normal the Sunday school services that he had been attending at his local church.
When John went home his grandfather asked him what he had learned at his Sunday school. He sat down and told him what had happened and how they had gone to another church for the service that day and how much he had enjoyed it.
His grandfather got off his seat, walked over to him and grabbed him before shaking him about and punishing him. He couldn’t understand why he got a beating for going to the wrong church.
There were two churches together. John who didn’t know anything about the different religions had gone to the church of England when his grandparents had wanted him to go to the church of Scotland.
John was finding it hard to understand his grandparents. When they had come to Tronbridge they had told him that he wasn’t allowed mix or to play with anyone who was a catholic. He had already disobeyed them by playing with David one of his best friends who was.
John thought it was strange why he wasn’t allowed to play with his friend who was the same as him.
He decided that if he needed to tell lies to survive in the city then that’s what he would do in the future.
His first few months in Tronbridge were spent going to school and making new friends. He had already made a lot of new friends in the areas that his grandmother had told him not to go near.
The tenement houses that some of his school friends lived in were small and they were due to be demolished.
They had been told since the war that their houses were going to be demolished and that they would be moved in to new houses with their own baths and toilets, but it had never happened. They were quite happy where they were.
Some of the houses were single ends and they had a whole family staying in one room. They had to share the toilet which was in the stair with the other families because their houses didn’t have inside toilets or baths. They went to the local swimming pool for a bath.
John noticed that the people living in these houses were always smiling. He had already been to some of his friends houses in the streets that he should have been keeping away from.
It was just as well that his grandparents didn’t know that some of the children from those streets had been warned by their parents not to play with him because he was wild and always getting himself in to trouble.
John was starting to move around the area and he was slowly getting to know the people who were there. His English dialect had gone and he was now speaking with a good Scots tongue.
The school holidays were coming around again and John knew that he would be allowed out more by his grandparents.
His grandfather seldom went out, and if he did it was only to go down to the local pub for a drink. His grandmother was always busy in the house preparing the food and keeping the house clean. She only went out to get messages and occasionally to take John for new clothes and boots.
John’s grandmother told him one day that she had managed to get him a job in the newsagents shop that she got her papers from. He was told that he was to go down and see the owner of the shop.
John went down to the newsagents shop and was glad when Mrs Peterson gave him a job delivering papers in the mornings and evenings.
His grandmother got him up at five in the morning to give him his breakfast and to make sure that he was up in time for his paper round.
On his first day at work from the shop in Ashworth Street John found that the paper round was all in tenements and that it took him two hours to complete.
When he finished his paper round he went back home to give his grandfather a morning paper and to get a cup of tea before going to school.
John’s grandparents knew that John smoked cigarettes even though they had told him not to. Smoking was a habit that he had picked up in the orphanage from some of the older children. His first cigarette had been when he was seven years old. It had made him sick as a dog. But he had still carried on smoking.
When he could get a cigarette he would go for a fly smoke. John found that he could steal his cigarettes from the newsagents shop.
He had done it a few times before and he had become aware that Mrs Peterson didn’t know that her cigarettes were going missing. Her husband didn’t work in the shop with her. She run it by herself. When he went in to the newsagents shop in the mornings Mrs Peterson the owner was still sorting out the different paper runs for the paper boys in the back shop.
With his grandmother getting him up so early John was always first in the shop after Mrs Peterson. He was sometimes standing outside the shop waiting for her to come in.
That gave him the opportunity to lean over the counter and help himself to a packet of five woodbine cigarettes when he needed them.
His grandfather had told him that he had started smoking at an early age also. He had started smoking his pipe by going down to the back of the sheds at his school.
John’s grandfather had tried to put him off smoking by giving him his pipe to smoke which he had stuffed full of a dark strong tobacco. He had lit his pipe and handed it to John telling him inhale it.
When John inhaled it deeply he went white in the face. He had felt a sudden rush and ran through to the toilet to be sick. John had been put off smoking a pipe forever.
The houses in Ashworth Street were big houses and the one that Johns grandparents lived in had five large rooms. It had a big kitchen, a living room, a bathroom with toilet and three big bedrooms. It also had a big hall and a number of large cupboards for storage.
The people living in the tenements there were all professional people.
John had asked his grandparents about the area he was living in so that he could get a better understanding of it.
The streets that he had been told not to go near by his grandmother had been coachmen’s houses in years gone by. Cars had done away with the need for horses and carriages. They had also done away with the need for grooms and coachmen.
The houses had been rented out and they had eventually fallen in to disrepair over the years. Families in these areas came and went often moving at midnight where no one would see them going because of their debts.
John’s education had been improving and he had started to take an interest his schoolwork. Mrs Mcleod his school teacher knew how to get the best out of the children she was working with. She had gone around the class asking the children what they wanted to be when they grew up.
She then told the children what work they needed to improve on to get that kind of job. John changed his mind regularly because he didn’t really known what he wanted to be when he left school.
When John was at his school in Quarrybell he had heard the jeeps from the American air base going past his school every day. When he heard them he wanted to join the American air force as a jeep driver.
The second world war was still being talked about by most children and John was looking forward to the day when he would leave school, join the forces to go to fight the Germans.
John’s teacher told him that the war was over and that Britain was at peace with Germany. They were taught about the first and second world wars by their teacher. John then wanted to be a train driver, a fireman, a sailor, and a policeman. That change daily depending on what he saw or who he met on his travels.
The children had come back from their lunch break to be given a lesson by their teacher. John asked Mrs Mcleod if he could go to the toilet. She replied by telling him that he had just come back in to the classroom and that he should have gone before he came back in to the school.
John held on as long as he could. He crossed his legs and asked his teacher again if he could be excused again.
Mrs Mcleod told John that that he was disrupting her classroom. Eventually she told him stand behind the blackboard until he could behave himself properly.
The class was in uproar when a trickle of water started to flow along the floor from the other side of the blackboard. John had done the toilet against the back of the blackboard while Mrs Mcleod had been writing on the other side of it.
His teacher asked John why he did the toilet there. He told her that he had asked her a number of times to go to the toilet but she had refused to let him go. He had been unable to hold on any longer.
John was told to get a bucket and a mop to clean up the mess. He didn’t get punished off Mrs Mcleod for what he done.
The school had shut down when the holidays began and John found that he had a lot of spare time on his hands. He filled some of it in by going down to the Earlsridge river and fishing in it with a small net that his grandmother had bought for him to fish for minnows with.
John started hitting the water with the net when he couldn’t catch any fish.
He soon got bored with fishing and he walked in the water of the river with his boots on to see where the river came from until something else took his attention.
John was starting to realise that his grandparents didn’t know where he was or what he was up to. He was starting to run about wild without any control in the Earlsridge area.
His grandfather sat in the house all day because he was unable to go out. His age had caught up with him.
At first John had told him what he was doing when he came to Tronbridge often getting a row or beating for doing it. It hadn’t taken John to realise that if he didn’t need tell his grandparents what he was up because they wouldn’t know anyway.
He had lied on numerous occasions and found that it had been to his advantage. He still had to watch what he was doing in case any of the neighbours told his grandmother.
She still went out for her messages.
His grandmother knew most of the people in the area and she would often stand and speak to them, sometimes finding out things that John had lied about.
When they moved to their house in Ashworth Street the kitchen had become the main room in the house. It had a range, cooker, and sink where John’s grandmother was always busy cooking or baking cakes and scone. A sideboard sat at a wall by itself.
It also had a table in the middle of the floor with four chairs round it. The two armchairs with a side table sat close to the fire.
John’s grandfather sat in his armchair all day keeping his pipe radio and other bits and pieces on his side table. Occasionally getting up to go to the toilet or to go to bed at night.
During their holidays John and David decided to build a wall across Kings Row which was a quite street.
John grandmother allowed him to play in this street which had tenements along one side of it and spare land on the other. John and David carried bricks, stones and rubble all morning to build their wall right across the road.
They both wanted to stop the traffic using the street. Their wall was almost completed before a local policeman walking his beat came along and saw what they were doing. They didn’t know he had been watching them for awhile before he asked them what they were building.
John quickly told the policeman that they had found the bricks and stones across the road and that they were removing them. The policeman didn’t believe them. He took their names and addresses before telling them to clear the rubble away by the time he got back.
The policeman and watched them remove some of the rubble before continuing on his beat. John was glad that he didn’t go to his grandparents door to tell them.
During his holidays John had been looking forward to his Sunday school picnic. He delivered his morning papers before going home to get changed in to his best clothes.
His grandmother had told him to wear his good suit and best shoes. Before John left his grandparents house his grandmother tied a tin mug around his neck with a piece of string so that he wouldn’t lose it.
John went to the church to meet the Sunday school teachers and the other children before going to St Peter’s station to board a train.
None of the other children on the train knew where they were going as they excitedly sat down on their seats waiting for it to move..
The steam engine with its carriages pulled away from the station, puffing smoke on the journey of a lifetime. The children on the train started to get excited as the train left the buildings of the city and started to cross a bridge over a deep river slowly.
The Sunday school teachers gave each child on the train a half-penny to throw from the windows for good luck as it crossed the bridge.
They were told that it was a custom and that everyone on the train threw a coin in to the water and made a wish.
John put his half-penny in to his pocket and kept it for spending later. He remembered what his grandfather had told him about his mother and uncles going along under a bridge picking up the coins that had been thrown out of the trains for luck. He thought that the money was better being kept in his own pocket.
When the train arrived at the sea side village of Seaview the Sunday school teachers herded the children off the train checking their numbers to make sure that they hadn’t lost anyone.
The children walked through the village to go to the beach for the day.
They were all given a brown paper bag with some food in it to eat and their mugs were filled with milk that had been purchased by a Sunday school teacher from the village shop.
They played games on the beach and run around wild under the clear blue skies for most of the day. John went down to the waterside by himself to watch the sea sloshing backwards an forwards as the tide started to go out.
He noticed that there was a large piece of driftwood further along the beach and decided that it would make a good boat to go to sea in.
John who couldn’t swim got on the piece of driftwood and launched it in to water with himself on it. He was starting to get scared at the speed in which it was moving away from the beach as it bobbed up and down on the waves with him on it.
He lay still on his bit of wood terrified and shouted at the top of his voice for help.
Kenneth who lived in Northbrook Street which was round from the corner from his house saw him waving his arms and ran to get help from a Sunday school teacher.
The rest of the children stood at the waters edge when a Sunday school teacher started to take his clothes off and jumped in to the water.
The games on the beach had stopped while Mr Morran swam out to get John back to the shore.
There was a loud cheer from the other children who were standing watching the impromptu rescue from the waters edge.
The other Sunday school teachers held them back to make sure that no one else got to close to the water.
When Mr Morran reached John he tried to push the bit of wood with John on it in back to the beach. The wood toppled over and John fell in to the water. Mr Morran had to swim back to the shore dragging John behind him.
When they got back to the breach John was soaking like a drowned rat. The other Sunday school teachers dried him off as best they could with their towels.
John stood on the beach with his black hair covered in sand and his grey suit and shoes soaked right though. Mr Morran was the hero of the day.
He decided to take John back home early to his grandparents to stop him catching a cold.
John’s day at the beach had come to an abrupt end as him and Mr Morran sat on the train going back to Tronbridge By the time the Sunday school teacher got John home his clothes had started to dry out.
Mr Morran accompanied John to his grandparents house so that he could explain to them what had happened to him. John was happy when his Sunday school teacher told them that he been going on to a pleasure craft and that he had slipped off a gangplank in to the water.
When Mr Morran left John’s house his grandmother told him to take his suite and shoes off so that she could get them cleaned. They had started turn white with the salt that had come from salt sea water.
A few days later John went to play with one of his school friends who lived in Woodford Place one of the streets that he had been told not to go near.
John and his friend Colin played in the old air raid shelters which were at the back of Colin’s house in Woodford Place. They were arches that had been bricked up. They had a doorway in them so that the people in the tenements of Monument Street and Woodford Place could get in to them should there be any air raids over Tronbridge during the second world war.
John and his friends played at being soldiers. One side were British and the other side were the Germans.
They spent happy hours in the air raid shelters letting their imaginations running wild. John didn’t see any point in telling his grandparents where he going any more. If they had known they would have told him not to go where he was going.
His grandfathers temper seemed to be getting worse as he sat around the house doing nothing all day but listening to the radio. Television was still out of the question for John’s grandparents. They couldn’t afford one.
John often used to go around to his friend David’s house in Kings Row to watch his mothers television.
David told John he was an American. His father was an American soldier who was based in Britain during the second world war. David believed that one day his father was going to return to Britain and take him and his family to the United States to stay with him.
He had been waiting a long time.
John’s school holidays were soon over and he was starting to make his way back to school again. His grandmother had bought him a new pair of short trousers and a pair of boots with tacks in them.
John and his friends William and Laura passed a sauce factory in Kings Row Lane on their way to school.
When they passed the factory they would stop and speak to the boilerman who was always standing at the gates watching what was going on in the lane.
One day he told John, William and Laura to wait outside the factory gates while he went inside. The boilerman came back with a great big bunch dates. He gave them to the children to eat on their way to school. He did this for a number of weeks, until John, William and Laura got so fed up eating dates that they started going to their school by a different route.
There was always something happening on their way to and from school. They would often go in to the wash house and watch the woman doing their washing and hanging their clothes on the clothes horses.
John, William and Laura who were all the same age would all sit in the wash house talking to Laura’s grandmother before helping her to wheel her washing home on her buggy. They got a shared bar of chocolate for helping her to wheel her washing home.
Bonfire time had come around again and John had noticed that the way it was done in the city was different from the way it had been organised in the country.
After John had delivered his evening papers he went home for his tea. He asked his grandparents if he could go out and play.
John was nine on his last birthday and his grandparents had started to allow him to stay out a little bit longer in the evenings providing he kept himself out of trouble.
The children from the different streets started to collect their own bonfire wood.
John was told by his friends who lived in Kings Row that their bonfire would be lit in the middle of the street and that there would be another one outside the Two churches at the end of Northbrook Street.
He was told by David that anything that they gathered would have to be guarded and protected with their lives. John was warned that the children from other areas would come and take any bonfire wood that they had gathered.
It didn’t take them long to gather and store their bonfire wood which was kept down a basement. They had now been gathering their wood for a week.
John and his friends had gathered wardrobes, sideboards, suites, carpets and anything else that people were throwing out. A day before bonfire night David suggested that they should go and raid some bonfire wood from another area.
John didn’t know what they were going to do. He agreed to go along with the rest of the children who were all eager to go and raid more material for their bonfire.
John was given a chair leg for a cudgel along with the other children who were going with them. He asked what was he supposed to do with it because he hadn’t needed one in Quarrybell. John was told by David that if anyone tried to stop them taking their bonfire wood he was to hit them over the head with his cudgel.
A dozen children set off to go on their raid. The younger children and girls stayed back to guard what they had already gathered. They were told to guard it with their lives until the rest came back.
They reached the street that they were going to raid the other gangs bonfire wood from. There were only a few older children when they got there. The rest of them had gone to raid another bonfire.
They walked in to the street to take the other gangs bonfire wood. One brave boy walked up and stood in front of them.
The leader of the other gang walked up to John with his cudgel and threatened him with it.
John lifted his cudgel high above him and hit the other boy over the head with it splitting his head open.
The rest of the children that he had gone with turned and ran away when they saw the sight of blood. John followed them not knowing what was happening.
They returned back to Kings Row and John asked why they had run away without taking any bonfire wood. He was told by David that he was not meant to hit anyone with the cudgel that he had been given.
They were only carrying their cudgel’s to frighten anyone who tried to stop them.
John had blundered by hitting one of his opposition over the head with his cudgel. David told the rest of the children that the boy John had hit over the head had a big brother who would go looking for them.
John was glad when no one came from the street that they had gone to raid. They built their bonfire in the middle of the street and some of the adults who lived in the area helped them by adding the finishing touches.
When it got dark the bonfire that they had built was lit. John watched his work go up in flames for two hours before eventually having to go home.
The bonfire was still burning fiercely in the middle of the street when he left, but it was now surrounded by adults.
Christmas had come and gone and John continued to explore his city.
His grandparents had not allowed him to take his bicycle out of the house. They told him that the streets in the city were too busy with cars, buses, trams and taxi’s and that he would have to wait until he was a bit older before he could use it again.
John understood what they meant. There were always trams hurtling down Ashworth Street rattling and sometimes slipping as they went. John had watched the trams going up hill on Ashworth Street and they always seemed to go slower .
His grandmother had taken him on a tram when she had taken him to get some clothing.
John was as white as a ghost when his grandmother had to take him off the tram and walk the rest of the way to the shops.
Everytime that John had been on a tram he had been violently sick. The trams which ran along almost every main street in Tronbridge shook from side to side as they moved along the rails which were sunk deep in to the cobbled roads.
The conductress in her smart uniform with her money bag slung over her shoulder had been nice to John who felt ill. She had told him and his grandmother that she would clean the mess up.
John wondered if he would ever get used to travelling on the cities aging transport.
His grandmother always made sure that he was properly fed. He never wanted for food.
He always had a big breakfast of porridge bacon, eggs, black pudding, sausages, tomatoes and bread before he went out in the morning.
In the city he always had to go home from school at lunch time. This was so that his grandmother could give him his bowl of home made broth, stew and pudding.
At tea time he got a salad, kedgeree or a deep cheese dish along with his bread .
When John was in the house he would often watch his grandmother cooking and baking. She was always making cloutie dumplings and sultana cake for him, his grandfather and his uncle Frank who ate at the table with them when he came back from his work in the evenings.
John got to clean out the large mixing bowl. He would scrape it out and eat what had been left of the sweet mixture which had been put in to a baking tins for the oven. There was always a smell of fresh baking and cooking in their house.
Saturday had come around again and John and some of his friends from Hillpark Street decided to go further afield. They started to walk towards Tronbridge city centre.
The main street in Tronbridge was Crown Street. It had big stores running along both sides of the street. This was where the people of Tronbridge would go when they needed clothes, the ironmongers shop, electrical goods, and anything else that they found difficult to get in their local shops.
Stamford’s store on Crown Street which sold almost everything was the first and only self service store in the city.
All the other stores in Tronbridge had staff serving their customers from behind the counters. Butter was patted and cheese was cut with a wire. Fresh and dried produce was weighed on the scales to the customers requirements.
John had often gone to the shops with his grandmother for food in Earlsridge and he had watched the shop staff in clean overalls behind the counter getting what she had asked for. Often throwing on a little bit extra on for good measure.
When John and his friends arrived in Crown Street they walked along the main thoroughfare looking in all the shop windows wishing that they had the money to buy the goods that were on display.
The men’s wear shops had staff out on the street with their measuring tapes and samples of cloth. They were trying to entice the men who were walking along the main street to go in their shops to buy a suit. The dark brown and royal blue suits had been reduced in price.
Saturdays were always busy on Crown Street with people walking from one end of the street to the other ladened with packages and boxes of all shapes and sizes.
The trams, buses, taxi’s and cars were being directed at the main junctions by policemen who stood on wooden platforms.
John looked at the cars that were parked at the kerb along the length of the street and wondered what kind of car he would buy when he was old enough to drive.
He cast his eye along the street on the Ford Popular, Austin Hereford, Morris Six, Riley RMA, and Rover Ten wondering what sped each of them did. John’s eye caught sight of an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire and a Alvis Grey Lady gliding gracefully along the street. He decided that the luxury cars which were big and had long bonnets were the cars for him..
When John and his friends came to Stamford’s store they walked in to have a look around at the goods that were on the shelves. They walked up a number of aisles touching and prodding the goods.
John noticed a man in his early twenties following and watching them, but hadn’t paid pay much attention to him. John had no idea that one of his friends had been shoplifting until the floorwalker in a checked sports jacket and black trousers came over and stopped them.
The floorwalker told them who he was before asking them all to go through to the back of the store with him. The other shoppers in the store stood and watched as they were led away.
When they were in the back of the store they were told to empty their pockets. John turned the pockets of his short trousers inside out to reveal his handkerchief, house keys and four marbles.
He emptied the pockets of his jerkin which had a piece of string, a small pocket knife, an old battered mouth organ, a box of matches and a cigarette packet with one cigarette in it.
When his friends turned out their pockets the floorwalker found what he was looking for. One of his friends had lifted a bar of chocolate off a shelf and put it in to his pocket.
Walter who had stolen the bar of chocolate burst in to tears frightened that he would go to jail for what he had done. He sobbed and promised he would never steal again as long as he lived while pleading with the floorwalker to let him go home.
The floorwalker took out his note book and asked them all their names and addresses before writing them down. When he had taken their names and addresses he took them to the back door of the store and put them out on to the street telling them that the police would be notified.
They were told never to go back in to Stamford’s store again. John and his friends walked back to Earlsridge worried that the floorwalker would tell the police that they had all been shoplifting.
Walter was made to walk down the other side of the streets by himself when the other boys shunned him.
John went home to his grandparents worried by every knock that came to the door for weeks.
After a few weeks the police still hadn’t come to see them about his day out in the city centre and he realised that he was lucky to have got off with it. John decided that the stores on Crown Street were not a place for him and his friends to be going to.
John knew that his grandparents meant well and any advice that they did give him was for his own good. But sometimes when they told him it went in one ear and right out of the other. John would go and do the very opposite of what they had told him not to do.
He had been allowed to do what he wanted by himself for far to long.
Chapter 4
In The Picture
John who was thirteen now was going to his to his secondary school and things had changed. He was now working in a butcher shop in the evenings and on Saturdays.
When he had got the job he needed to be able to use the butcher bike for making his deliveries. His grandparents had conceded that he was old enough to use a bicycle in the city. His grandfather had settled down and he was not as harsh on him as he had been before.
John was finding out that he could sometimes sit and talk rationally with his grandparents who did care for him.
When he did do something wrong that needed a reprimand he knew that he was better off than most of the other children in the area.
He had never wanted for food, and his grandmother had always made sure from the day that he went to stay with them that he was well fed and properly clothed.
John was beginning to understand that they were not a young couple and that their values had come from a different era. They had both been born in the last century and they had seen a lot of changes in their lives.
Some of the changes had been hard to adapt to for a lot of people.
One day John’s grandfather who had not been well started to bring up blood. He been weak and off his food for days and he had looked white and ill.
John’s grandfather had gone to his bed and was sick in a bucket that had been placed at the side of it. He was sick in it most of the day and he kept on bringing up dark clotted blood. John’s grandmother had wanted to call the doctor in earlier, but he wouldn’t let her.
His word had always been final. Eventually she decided that the doctor would have to come if he wasn’t going to bleed to death. John sat in the kitchen worried while his grandmother attended his grandfather in their bedroom. Things were now looking very serious for him.
The doctor didn’t take long to come to the house. He took one look at the blood that he had been bringing up and called an ambulance immediately.
John’s grandfather had been haemorrhaging from the stomach and he was to be rushed to the hospital as an emergency admission. He hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital and he protested to Doctor Cunningham that he would be all right given a few days in his own bed.
Doctor Cunningham who was the family doctor was having none of it as he was lifted out of his bed by the ambulance men, put on a stretcher and taken down the stairs to the waiting ambulance.
John watched from the window as the ambulance sped up the hill with its bell ringing while overtaking the other traffic. John’s grandmother went with the ambulance to see her husband being settled in to Tronbridge general hospital.
John waited in the kitchen with his uncle Frank knowing that they might not see him again. John had never talked a lot to his uncle who kept himself to himself in his own room. He had always bought John a good Christmas present and sat at the table with them when they were having their tea.
His uncle Frank tried to make John feel better by reassuring him that his grandfather would be all right given time. He told him that they would soon fix him up in the hospital and send him back home again.
John was finding that hard to believe after hearing what the doctor had said. He just wanted his grandfather to come home.
His uncle Frank started talking to him about his grandfather and what he had done in the past.
He had flown aeroplanes in the early days of flight and during the first world war. John shut his eyes and to try and imagine what it must have been like being in the air in the early days of flight. He tried to picture his grandfather kited out with a helmet, flying jacket, boots and goggles.
He remembered that he had heard his grandfather talking to his grandmother when he was younger about the Royal Flying Corps and The Royal Air Force, but he didn’t understood what they were talking about.
John spoke to his uncle Frank about what he had done during the war and how he been sunk on his ship. His uncle Frank didn’t want to talk about it. He got up off his seat and walked to his room leaving John in the kitchen by himself.
John sat thinking about his grandfather, and resigned himself to waiting in the kitchen for his grandmother to come back from the hospital and to tell him when his grandfather would be would be coming home again.
By the time his grandmother came back from the hospital John was in his bed fast asleep.
His bedroom was next to his grandparents bedroom at the back of the house. He had a bed, sideboard, wardrobe, small table and chair in it.
The sideboard had some model planes and boats that his grandfather had encouraged him to build. There was also a yellowing picture of a Sopwith triplane with a pilot standing beside it in his greatcoat hanging on the wall. His teacher Mrs Mcleod had showed him pictures of aeroplanes and taught the class about the wars.
Next morning when his grandmother got him up out of his bed he was told that he wouldn’t be going to school that day. John thought that the worst was yet to come and he was waiting for the bad news.
His uncle Frank had come through to the kitchen and was sitting down at the table with them for breakfast. He hadn’t done that in the past. He normally only ate with them at tea time.
When the porridge was placed on the table John’s grandmother told them both that she would be going to the hospital later on that day to see her husband. John was going with her.
When she had left the hospital the night before they had been giving him blood transfusion to stabilise him.
When John’s uncle Frank went to his work John was told that he would be going to the hospital with his grandmother after lunch.
She told him to go to the shops for her and get her some messages while she sorted out their bedroom. She had decided to change things around while John’s grandfather was out of the house.
John had never been in their room. They had always kept It locked. He had often wondered why they locked their bedroom door when there was only him, his uncle Frank and his grandparents living in the house.
John got ready and made his way to the shops that he had been told to go to.
His grandmother had written him a list with the things that she required on it. He had to go to the fishmonger to get Robbie their cat some fish. John had been getting on well with the cat and he had grown to like it.
They had become friends and the cat would occassionally sit on his lap purring. It would still show him who was boss by swipping him with it claws if he pulled its tail or tormented it to much.
The cat which was a tortoise shell had been taken in by his grandparents when they found it abandoned in Earlsridge.
John went to the shops and got what his grandmother had sent him for before returning back to the house. When he opened the front door with his keys he walked through lobby and went through to the kitchen to place the leather shopping bag that his grandmother had given him on the table.
His grandmother wasn’t in the kitchen so he went through to their bedroom to tell her that he was back. He turned the handle of the bedroom door which was unlocked and entered it to find that his grandmother wasn’t there either.
John walked in to the room which was dark and old fashioned looking. The heavy curtains were drawn and there was only a little bit of light filtering in to the room through the side of the curtains. He switched the light on and shut the door to have a look at the room that no one was allowed in to.
John noticed the large dark walnut wardrobe standing in the corner. He continued looking around the room and noticed the rest of the bedroom suite which consisted of a chest of draws, tallboy and a dressing table with a mirror in the middle of it and two side mirrors.
There were two chairs in the room and a large storage box at the bottom of their bed.
The green and red wallpaper on the walls with large flowers looked very old fashioned.
John noticed a black and white picture of a triplane on the wall with a pilot standing beside it like the one that was in his room.
He walked over to have a closer look at it. As he moved over the room he heard a key being turned in the lock.
His grandmother who had been in the front room had come back when she remembered that she hadn’t locked the door.
John didn’t know what to do as he stood looking at the picture which was discoloured trying to work out an excuse for being in their bedroom. He looked up at the picture closer and notice that the pilot standing beside the Sopwith triplane in leathers was his grandfather.
His stomach was churning when he realised that his grandfather had been a pilot in the first world war. He had never spoken to him about flying or what he had done during the wars.
John was excited and he wanted to know more about he young man with fair hair who was in the picture.
He walked over to the chest of draws and pulled open a draw quietly so that his grandmother wouldn’t hear what he was doing. The top draw had clothes in it and he shut the draw working his way down them. When he reached the bottom draw and pulled it open he noticed that there was a black leather covered box in it.
John lifted it gently and opened it to have a look. There were medals in it. The colours of the ribbons caught john’s eye as he looked at his grandfathers medals before closing the box and putting it back where he had found it.
His head was spinning. He didn’t know what the cross and round medals were for or why his grandfather had received them.
He walked over to the big storage box at the bottom of his grandparents bed and lifted the lid to have a look in it before working out how he was going to get out of their room.
When he lifted the lid he felt a strong smell of leather. He looked in to the box and only saw blankets.
He wondered where the smell was coming from, so he pulled the blankets gently to one side of the box. There was an old worn leather flying jacket with a hat like he had seen in pictures.
John had seen all that he had wanted to see and put the blankets back where they had been and tried to shut the lid of the box gently. The lid of the storage box slipped out of his hands and fell down nosily banging as it shut.
He heard his grandmother walking through the house and putting the key in the lock.
His grandmother opened the door and saw the light on and John standing beside the door waiting to get out.
She asked him what he was doing in their bedroom. John replied by telling her that he had come back with the messages and couldn’t find her. He had gone in to her room to look for her and she had locked him in.
His grandmother accepted what he was telling her and told him to go through the kitchen for his lunch.
When lunch was over John and his grandmother went to the bus stop to get a bus to the hospital to see his grandfather.
They arrived at the Tronbridge general hospital and John’s grandmother took him to the ward that she had been to the night before.
They were shocked when they saw him in his bed covered in bandages from head to foot. He was far worse than what they had expected.
John and his grandmother sat on the chairs beside the bed which was close to the door and tried to talk to the man who was unconscious and who’s face was covered in bandages. John sat almost in tears at the thought of his grandfather lying in a hospital bed dying.
He hadn’t had the chance to get to know him properly because he was always running wild. They sat at the side of the bed looking at him.
John’s grandmother did something that he had never seen her doing before. She put her hand on his grandfathers hand and held it for awhile.
John’s grandmother got up from the chair to locate a nurse and to find out what was happening to him. She already knew that a bed near the door meant that they could wheel the body out of the hospital ward quickly without upsetting the other patients.
A nurse came back with John’s grandmother and took the two of them to another bed which was further up the ward.
John’s grandfather had been moved from the doors of the ward indicating that he was ill but stable. They sat beside his bed and found him able to talk.
He was still weak and getting blood transfusions.
John’s grandmother spoke to a nurse who was on his ward and found out that they were keeping him in for another two weeks providing everything went according to plan.
His grandfather looked pale and drawn in but he was able to have a laugh with them when they told them what had happened further down the ward.
John’s nerves were getting the better of him with all the excitement and the smell ether in the hospital ward. He had to go outside to get some fresh air and to be sick.
He waited outside the hospital until his grandmother came out to go home with him.
John carried on working in the butcher shop after school and did all that he could to help his grandmother who was very close to her husband.
There was only a year of difference between them in age. John’s grandfather had married when he was twenty five years old in 1912.
They had only been separated by the war years which were long past. John discovered that when they had worked in service, they had always worked on the same estates. His grandmother was the cook while his grandfather worked on the gardens.
John’s grandmother told him that he would carry on with his usual routines. She didn’t want his secondary school education, his bible class at Sunday school, or work being disrupted.
He was still allowed to go out and play with his friends in the evening, though he didn’t intend straying to far or getting himself in to trouble while his grandfather was in hospital.
John was old enough to know that any worry wouldn’t help his grandmother who was coming to terms with the shock of his grandfather being taken ill.
On Friday David took John to his church so that he could pray and light a candle for his grandfather. John who had never been in a catholic chapel before watched what David did so that he could copy him.
He took his hand and crossed himself and then got down on his knees to talk to god to make himself feel better. His own church was only open on Sundays.
John had wanted to go to church immediately. He didn’t tell his grandmother where he had been because he knew she wouldn’t have approved. John felt that going to church and praying would soon make his grandfather better.
On Sunday David disobeyed his mother by not going to the chapel, he went with John to his church because John had gone to St Marks with him.
When they got there John told Mr Morran his Sunday school teacher what had happened to his grandfather and how he had prayed every night at his bedside for him.
Mr Morran who knew how John was feeling told him that they would say a prayer and sing a hymn for him during their service. John was told that he could select a hymn and psalm to sing to make him feel better.
He thought for awhile before selecting ‘Abide With Me’ and ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. John shared his hymn book with David and the two of them stood and sang at the top of their voices throughout the service.
After three weeks in hospital John’s grandfather was allowed home providing he took thing easy. His grandmother went to the hospital to bring him home while John was went to work for White the butchers.
He had wanted to stay off his work and go with his grandmother, but she had told him that his work came first. With it being Saturday, John knew that he could go home at lunch time to see him.
Months had passed by and johns grandfather had settled down again in his house. His health was starting to improve and he was starting to put weight back on.
He had been stuck on a diet by the doctors when he had left the hospital, but he was finding increasingly it difficult to stick to with the smell of fresh foods always being cooked and baked in the house.
John had been to jumble sale and he had picked up an old wind up gramophone and a pile of records for a shilling to give to his grandfather. His grandparents and him would sit and talk while listening to the records in the evening when there wasn’t anything else suitable on the radio.
Chapter 5
You’re Fired
John had tried to ask his grandfather about his war service without much success. He had always changed the subject and gone on to something else leaving his questions unanswered.
John couldn’t say that he had looked in his chest of draws or storage box without giving himself away. When he was out playing he would boast to his unbelieving friends that his grandfather had been a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and that he had flown an aeroplane.
John who was fourteen now was looking forward to the day that he would be leaving school. He only had two months to go. White’s the butcher had promised him an apprenticeship when he left school if he continued working for them the way that he had.
He went in to the shop after school and made any deliveries that were required on the butchers bicycle which had a basket on the front of it.
John knew Tronbridge better than most taxi driver who lived there. He had been all over the city on his own bicycle which his grandparents had allowed him to use when he got his job with the butcher.
On Saturdays he worked all day for the butcher delivering meat, serving behind the counter and helping Mr White make black pudding, haggis and sausages.
Sometimes when it was lunch time he would go up to Northbrook Street Lane and hang about with his friends for his hour and a half break. He was growing up fast and his days of playing soldiers were long gone.
John and his friends played kick the can and hide and seek with the girls in the evenings now. He would also speak to Paul who had a garage in Northbrook Street Lane.
Northbrook Street Lane ran parallel at back of the tenement buildings and it could be entered from both ends of the main Street.
The walls which separated the lane from the gardens were at the back of the tenements and were fourteen foot high. The teenagers would often climb on to the walls and run along them when they were playing.
John had done it many times before and he had become accustomed to the hight.
The first time that he had climbed the wall with the other children he was a little bit wary. He had cast his mind back to when he was ten years old and in Grange park.
The park had swings, a roundabout, climbing frame and a slide which was fifteen foot high.
John was there by himself waiting for his friends to turn up when he decided to climb up the slide and use it as a vantage point. When he got to the top of the slide he looked over and felt dizzy. He lost his balance and fell headfirst. John knocked himself out when he landed on the ground which was covered with tar.
His grandmother kept off school for a week because of headaches and a twisted neck.
John who was having his lunch break in Northbrook Street Lane away from the butcher shop decided that he wanted to ride his bicycle along the fourteen foot high wall. He had walked and ran along them so often he could almost do it with his eyes shut.
When he told his friends David, Fred, Tommy, Alice and Sandra who were all the same age as him what he was going to do they laughed at him.
They thought he was only joking until he climbed on to the wall and asked the other boys to pass his butchers bicycle up to him.
Alice and Sandra tried to pursued him not to do it for his own sake. They told him that he would fall and kill himself.
John had already made his mind up and the other boys who were starting to pass his bicycle up wanted to see him do it. He had already got himself a reputation as being wild and not frightened of anything.
When he got his bicycle on to the wall he stood and tried to balance himself before manoeuvring it close to a telegraph pole. John found out that It was more difficult than he had imagined as he tried to get his bicycle in to the position that he wanted.
Alice and Sandra who were standing looking up at him wanted him to give up and take his bicycle off the wall.
John had wanted to ride his bicycle on the back walls for a long time and he had no intentions of giving up now.
The telegraph pole which was ten foot higher than the wall gave John something to hold on to while he was standing on the wall with his bicycle. He held on to it until he was able to find his balance and lift his leg over the crossbar.
When he felt that he was steady enough he put his backside on to the seat and started to roll the bicycle backwards and forwards slowly. He lifted his feet up and put them on the pedals.
John sat for awhile looking at the wall which ran along the full length of the lane.
John started to pedal his bicycle along the wall to the amazement of the other children who walked along the lane looking up at him.
He kept his balance and his bicycle in a straight line and didn’t look down as he edged his way along the wall. John kept going until he came to another telegraph pole which was halfway along the lane.
He decided that he gone far enough for his first attempt.
When he stopped to regain his balance John’s friends cheered at what he had done. They didn’t think he would have been able to do it.
He asked David, Tommy and Fred to help him get his bicycle back off the wall so that he could go back to his work. He was already ten minutes late and his boss had warned him about returning to work late from his lunch break.
White’s the butcher was a family business and John knew that old man White’s bark was worse than his bite. He got on well with him and every Saturday night he would give him a meat parcel to take home with his wages to his grandmother.
Mr and Mrs White’s son Malcolm who was thirty years old worked in the shop with them. He had served in the army during the war and he was always kidding John on that he had taken the German army on single handed and beaten them.
John got on well with Malcolm. The two of them had the same tastes when it came to food. They were always eating the cold meat from the counter when Mr and Mrs White were not looking.
Sometimes they would sit and fry sausages down in the basement out of the bosses sight.
John would try and get the better of Malcolm by making jokes about his car.
Malcolm had an Isseta Bubble Car which John had been in once and had refused to go in ever again.
Sometimes when they had an order for meat that was to go further afield, Malcolm would make the delivery in his Bubble Car.
John would deliberately try and upset Malcolm who was proud of his new car. John called it a fish bowl on wheels and would sometimes stand in the shop opening and shutting his mouth to mimic a gold fish in water.
John’s grandparents were glad of the meat parcels from his boss which were classed as part of his wages. They often had stewing steak, sausages and the ends of the roast beef, pork and lamb in them.
They were happy that he was working in a shop that might be able to give him an apprenticeship when he left school. John’s grandfather had rented his first black and white television and he was quite happy sitting watching it.
He liked watching sport of any kind which was something that John hated. When there was sport on the television he would go out.
John did different things with his spare time now that he was older and allowed to stay out until ten o’clock at night. He still went to the pictures and to his friends houses.
Some evenings he would go and play cards with his friends in the cafe and listen to the juke box while he had a bottle of coke.
On Sundays after his bible class John would go to the zoo and or take a walk along Crown Street by himself so that he could see what was going on in the centre of Tronbridge.
One day his grandparents told him that an uncle was coming to stay with them for a weekend. John only had two uncles and he knew that one of them was already staying with them in their house.
He asked his grandparents when his uncle Bill was coming from Hightown to stay with them.
John was told that it wasn’t his uncle Bill, it was his uncle Sam. He had never heard his grandparents talking about his uncle Sam before and he began to wonder what he was like. John couldn’t even remember getting a Christmas present from him.
Later on that night John asked his grandmother about his uncle and why he had never heard of him before.
His grandmother told him that his uncle Sam wasn’t his real uncle. He was one of his grandfathers friends.
Sam was the same age as his grandfather and they had been in the services together many years before. John was told that he would go to the railway station on Friday night and meet his uncle to take him home to his grandparents house.
John was excited that someone coming to their house to stay. His friends had always been kept at the front door. He had never been allowed to take anyone in to his house.
On Friday evening John made his way to St Peter’s Railway Station to meet his uncle. His grandparents gave him a description of what he looked like.
When John got to the station he asked a porter who was in uniform and wheeling a barrow with suite cases on it what platform the train from Cumberton would be arriving at. John got the information that he required, got a platform ticket and stood on the platform to wait on the train coming in.
St Peter’s Station was a busy station and the noises of trains blowing off steam, guards blowing their whistles and people shouting was deafening.
John looked down the railway line as the steam engine pulled in to the station slowly with a long line of carriages behind it. It had a large plume of coal smoke above it which lay on the underside of the station roof that was covered with glass and metal.
When the train shuddered to a stop at the platform it let off its steam with a loud hissing noise. There were other people on the platform waiting for relations and friends to alight from the carriages.
John who was small for his age looked to see if he could see his uncle Sam.
The people who got off the train were rushing for the gate to give the ticket collectors their tickets so that they could go to the taxi rank for a taxi.
John looked for a man who had his dark brown hair well groomed and was quite tall.
His grandparents had told him that his uncle Sam was above average hight, well groomed and smart looking and that he walked with a very straight back which was rigid.
John couldn’t see him in amongst the people who were starting to thin out a bit. He did notice an elderly gentleman who was wearing a tweed suit, a hat and was carrying a suitcase and a cane walking stick with a silver top on it.
For a brief moment John thought he knew the mans face but he couldn’t quite place it. Eventually the elderly man with grey thinning hair swept back was the only person left standing on the platform.
He walked towards John and asked him if he had been sent by Mr and Mrs Anderson to take him to their house. John told him that he was their grandson and offered to carry his suitcase for him.
They walked towards the gates of the platform with John carrying his case. The man had changed a lot over the years. His grandparents had given him a description of the man they had remembered many years before.
Sam had aged like his grandfather.
John took him to the bus stop where they waited for a bus to take them home right to his grandparents door. His uncle Sam took the suitcase from John so that he could carry it himself.
When the bus arrived they got on the platform which was at the back of the bus and sat on an empty seat which was close to the door.
While the bus took them home John’s uncle Sam told him all about the little cottage that he stayed in at the village of Cumberton.
It didn’t take them long to arrive at Ashworth Street where they got off and made their way up to his grandparents house.
When Sam walked in to the house he was greeted by John’s grandparents as if he was their long lost brother. They told him to sit down while John’s grandmother got him a cup of tea and some cake that she had baked the day before for his visit.
John sat and listened to them talking while he looked at his grandparents and his uncle Sam’s faces.
John suddenly remembered where he had seen his uncle Sam’s face before. He got up without saying anything and went through to his bedroom to look at the picture that was on his wall. He stood and looked at the picture for awhile.
The man in the picture was his uncle Sam when he had been younger. He had been in the Royal Flying Corps also
John went through to the kitchen and looked at his uncles face just to make sure he had got it right. He had noticed the badge with wings and RFC on the lapel of his uncles jacket but hadn’t thought much about it.
It excited John to know that he was now sitting in a room with two veteran pilots from the first world war.
John’s grandmother told John it was time for him to go to his bed. His grandfather and his uncle Sam wanted to talk about old times and to have some beer that his grandmother had bought for them when she had been out shopping.
He protested and asked if he could stay up a little bit longer because his uncle Sam was staying with them. He was told that he would get a chance to speak to his uncle Sam when he came back from work at White’s the butcher the next day.
Before he went in to his bed that night John took the picture off his wall so that he could look at it closely. When he did go to bed he could hardly sleep for thinking about his grandfather and his uncle Sam flying their triplane’s in the clear blue skies.
Next morning John’s grandmother got him up to get him ready for his work. His grandfather was having a long lie and there was only him and her in the kitchen.
John asked his grandmother if his uncle Sam and his grandfather had been pilots in the war. He was told that they had both been in the Royal Flying Corps together and that he should ask them about it when he came back from his work.
His grandmother told him to eat his breakfast and to stop talking so much if he wasn’t going to be late for his work. He was told to get something to eat outside during his lunch break so that the two aging men could talk in private.
John was a little bit saddened that he couldn’t go home at lunch time because he had wanted to ask them so many questions about their pasts. John told Malcolm about his grandfather and his uncle Sam being in the Royal Flying Corps when he went to his work.
Malcolm didn’t believe him and told John that he was dreaming. The more John tried to convince him the more insulting he became about his grandfather. Malcolm’s father who was standing listening to their conversation took his sons side.
He started to insult John’s grandfather also. Mr White soon got fed up with it and told John to get his butchers bike and start making his deliveries. John got the packages of meat that were all made up and put them in to the basket on his bicycle to start delivering to the customers.
He was still angry at what Malcolm and his father had said about his grandfather when he left the shop.
John started pedalling his bicycle up the hill from butchers shop in Ashworth Street to make his first delivery when he suddenly changed his mind. Instead of making his deliveries he took his bicycle round to Northbrook Street Lane to see if any of his friends were out yet.
There was no one around because it was still to early for them. John took his bicycle in to Paul’s garage to spend some time with him. He had run his garage in the lane for six months and he had earned himself a good reputation as a car mechanic in the area. He always had cars lying outside the garage waiting to be repaired.
The older children would speak to Paul and sometimes help him to push a car in to his garage to be worked on. He had once been up to John’s grandparents house to fix a choked sink for them.
His grandmother couldn’t get a plumber one weekend and she had gone round to Paul’s garage hoping that he might have known one. He came round himself and cleared the sink for them for nothing.
He sat and spoke to John’s grandparents getting a cup of tea and a sandwich for his work.
Paul had often seen John carrying on in the lane with his friends, but he had never told his grandparents what he was up to.
The children in the area would often go and talk to him if they had any problems at school or at home. He would give them good advice and try to point them in the right direction if he could. The parents in the area trusted Paul and would often take him down a cup of tea while he was working on his cars.
After speaking to Paul for awhile John decided to carry on and deliver his butcher meat.
He took his bicycle from the garage and started to pedal it along the lane slowly looking up at the wall as he went.
John was about to leave the lane when Tommy and Fred came walking around the corner. Fred had his little brother Edward with him who was eleven years old. John stopped and got off his bicycle to speak to them and to find out where they were going.
They were going to hang around the lane until it was time for them to go to the pictures. Edward asked John if he really did cycle his butchers bike along the wall.
None of the children in the area had believed Tommy and Fred when they had told them what John had done.
Fred told Edward that John would cycle along the wall again to prove to him that he could do it, but only on the condition that he got in to the basket while he was cycling along the wall. John wasn’t keen on Fred’s suggestion that his little brother should sit in the basket of the butchers bicycle while he tried to go along the wall again.
After being called scared by his friends John decided to do it. Edward who had often ran along the wall with his brother and his friends was wanting to go along the wall in the basket.
John took the butcher meat out of the basket and laid it on the ground near the telegraph pole. He climbed on to the wall so that his friends could pass the bicycle up to him.
Tommy and Fred manoeuvred in to the same location so that he get it properly balanced. John found it easier the second time round and he got it sitting on the wall where he wanted it quite quickly.
When he was sitting on the bicycle with his feet on the wall he rolled it backwards and forwards like he had done before.
Fred’s brother Edward who had climbed on to the wall along with John had wanted to get in to the basket before he had even found his balance.
When John was ready to cycle along the wall he told Edward what way he wanted him to sit in the basket at the front of the bicycle. He was told by John to hold on to the telegraph pole, lower himself in to the basket and to cross his legs when he was sitting down in it.
John held on to the telegraph pole until Edward was firmly seated where he wanted him.
Some of the people in the tenements had their windows open and were leaning out to watch was going on. John told Edward not to move once he started moving, because if he did they would both fall off the fourteen foot wall.
John made a move and started to go along the wall on his bicycle. He found it easier with the extra weight on the front and he made his way to the next telegraph pole with Tommy and Fred walking along beside them on the ground. They were all shouting in disbelief.
More windows had opened and some other people had stuck their heads out of their windows to see what was happening.
John asked Edward if he wanted to go along to the end of the wall to complete the full length of the lane.
It didn’t take Edward long to make up his mind up to continue. John got to the end of the wall and stopped for a rest before deciding to turn the bicycle around and go back along the wall the same way that he had come. This time they intended to make a complete run from one end of the wall to the other without stopping.
Tommy and Fred climbed on to the wall to help them turn the bicycle around and to walk along the wall behind them.
When he was ready John cycled the bicycle back to the telegraph pole that he had started from and was relieved that he had made it without falling.
The people who were leaning out of their windows clapped when John reached the telegraph pole and stopped to let Edward out of the basket so that he could get his bicycle back off the wall.
They hadn’t notice the bubble car which had been sitting in the lane while they had made their last run along the wall. Mr White had received a number of phone calls to his shop from his customers asking when their butcher meat would be delivered.
Malcolm had sat in his bubble car which was hidden behind one of Paul’s cars in the lane and he had watched John and Edward going along the wall on the bicycle. He had decided to wait until they all got off the wall before opening the front door of his bubble car to get out.
Malcolm had known where John would be and he had gone to the lane before he went anywhere else. John and his friends got the bicycle off the wall and stood back on to the ground.
When John went over to get the butcher meat that he had left on the ground It had gone. His stomach was churning when he saw the paper that the meat had been wrapped in lying on the ground.
One of the stray dogs that lived in the area had found it and helped itself. John had no idea what he was going to tell Mr White when he got back to the shop. He stood with his bicycle and friends trying to work out an excuse.
When he saw Malcolm walking towards him, he felt even worse than what he had before. Malcolm reached John and told him to take the bicycle back to the shop before getting back in to his bubble car and driving off.
John pedalled his bicycle to the shop in Ashworth Street slowly knowing that Malcolm would be back before him. He knew that he would have told Mr and Mrs White what he had been up to.
When John arrived at the shop he placed his bicycle against the window and walked in to the shop sheepishly.
Mr White who was waiting for him told him that he had already heard what he had been doing when he should have been delivering his butcher meat. He also told him that when Malcolm had been sitting in the lane in his bubble car he had seen the dog tearing the parcels open and eating the butcher meat.
Malcolm was standing behind his father waving his arms in the air to simulate an aeroplane flying. He was gloating at John while his father was telling him he was fired.
John took off his blue and white stripped apron and left the shop to go home to tell his grandparents what had happened. He couldn’t tell his grandmother lies as to why he had been fired because she went in to White’s shop for her butcher meat.
John couldn’t face them and decided to go to the cafe to talk to his friends before going home.
The two brothers who run the Ice Cream parlour come cafe were always full of advice to the young clientele who used their shop. Their father had a chip shop in Northbrook Street and he had set them both up in the family business with a shop in the same street.
Tony and Joe who were both in their early twenties could relate to the young people who used their cafe.
When it was quite in the evenings during the week Tony, Joe and the teenage customers would play cards for small amounts of money.
Tony and Joe were unlikely to make a profit the way that they run their cafe. John and his friends got their bottles of coke for nothing and no one ever put any money in to the juke box.
Tony would open that with his key and put on a selection of rock and roll music that lasted all night.
The cafe was the local hang out for the teenagers of Earlsridge who would go there before going to the pictures or dancing in the evenings.
No self respecting person over the age of twenty would go in to the cafe on a Friday evenings when it was full of teenagers spending their money. It only had five tables and they took them all up.
The teenagers had made a fool of Tony when he had bought a Messerscmitt Tiger KR 200 car for him and his brother to run around in.
The car which had a cockpit like an aeroplane was the butt of their jokes.
The older people in the area stopped using their cafe because the car was made by a German company who had made aeroplane’s during the war. Joe wouldn’t get in the car with his brother to be laughed at.
One night Tony who was feeling dejected asked the people sitting in his cafe if any of them wanted to go a run with him in his car.
The car had only two seats and the space was limited. It had one at the front which was the drivers seat and one right behind the driver which was for the passenger.
John went with Tony in his car and the two of them had talked while he was driving.
He had told him about the picture he had on the wall and how his grandfather had been a pilot.
The two of them run around Tronbridge in the Messerscmitt kidding on that they were in the cockpit of an aeroplane going for the kill.
Tony had understood what it was to be laughed at until he sold the cat and bought a Lambretta Scooter.
After having his coke and listening to a few new records that had been put in the juke box John decided to go home and face his grandparents. He thought to himself that had no excuse and could only tell them the truth of what he had done.
When John walked in to the kitchen he noticed that there was only his grandparents sitting in the room. He didn’t get a chance to say anything to them.
Malcolm had already been up to his grandparents house and told them.
A row developed between him and his grandfather who was angry that he had lost his job and was no longer earning a wage. They needed the money to help with the upkeep of their house.
Instead of shutting up and taking the row John started to talk back to them making it even worse for himself.
He was told by his grandparents when he was old enough he would be thrown out of the house. They felt that they were getting to old to be sorting out the trouble that he got himself in to.
John went through to his room to sulk until it was tea time. When his grandmother called him to tell him to go through for his tea he asked why his uncle Sam wasn’t at the table with them.
His grandmother who had put his tea on the table told him that his uncle Sam had gone back home. He had been feeling unwell and he had left after lunch to go back to Cumberton.
Sam had been suffering bad health and had made the visit because his grandfather and him were getting to an age where they probably wouldn’t see each other much more.
John’s grandfather didn’t speak to him because he was still angry at his antics earlier on in the day.
When John had eaten his tea he got up from the table and went out to meet his friends because the atmosphere in the house was bad between him and his grandparents. John was sorry that he hadn’t had a chance to speak to his uncle Sam before he had left, but he knew that it was his grandfather that he had come to see.
Later on that evening twenty of his friends gathered in Northbrook Street Lane. The teenage boys and girls had gathered to talk, have a fly smoke and to have a game of kick the can and hide and seek.
They hung around until after ten that night to the annoyance of the people living in the tenements who shouted out of their windows.
John started going out of the house as much as he could in his last few weeks at school to save any rows with his grandparents.
Things had become strained and they were talking as little as possible to each other. John went to Crown Street to see what was happening in the city centre one Saturday afternoon.
He walked along to St Peter’s Railway Station to watch the trains and keep out of the way so he wouldn’t get in to any more trouble. He was due to leave school in two weeks time.
When John arrived at the Railway Station he notice that there was a circus being unloaded from a train.
The lorries and equipment were the first to be taken off the wagons for the big parade that would go along Crown Street. The circus was setting up on spare ground on the other side of Tronbridge.
John watched the showmen unloading the animals next and hitching the trailers to the tractors so they could be pulled along the streets.
He had heard about the annual circus parade, but he hadn’t bothered to go and see it before. The cages with lions and tigers were lined up in the station ready to be moved.
John wished that some of his friends had been with him when the horses with cowboys and Indians got out of the wagons with the elephants, llamas and clowns. John spoke to a circus hand and found that the big top and the tents for the animals had already been erected on the other side of the city.
They were taking the animals and performers to the location so that they could put on their first show the next day. John was starting to get in to the mood and was bubbling with excitement at what was going on around him.
There were people shouting, pointing and directing where they wanted the animals placed for the parade.
When they had unloaded the wagons on the train they got ready to move off. The band which was in front of the circus parade struck up and they started to march off with the rest of the animals and performers following on behind them.
John walked along beside the elephant and the clowns who joked with the people who were lining the route. He followed the circus all the way the big top forgetting any worries that he may have had earlier on in the day.
John was in no hurry to go home and when he arrived at the site of the circus he hung around talking to the clowns and performers. He was allowed to take a walk around the cages and animal enclosures. He had not had so much fun for a long time and thought for awhile about joining the circus.
John had been going to the zoo on Sundays after his bible classes once a month for almost a year and he had grown up to like animals.
Unlike his earlier days when he was frightened of anything that was covered in fur and walked.
When he had started going to the zoo on Sundays he soon found a way to sneak in to the zoo for nothing every week. He always went by himself so that he could walk and think in peace. He had walked to every corner of the zoo over a period of time and he had got to know where all the different animals were. John was sure that some of the animals knew him and were waiting for him to visit them.
Sometimes if he was lucky and he had made a little bit of extra money he would buy some food and feed them. He felt sorry for them and wished that he could release them back in to the wild.
In the monkey house John had got to know the giant orangoutang which sat in its cage all day looking out.
The first time the orangoutang put its hand between the bars and held it out for John to hold he didn’t know what to do.
After going to the zoo for a few weeks John gave the orangoutang an apple which it took and ate. After it had eaten the apple it put it hand out of the cage again to hold his hand. John plucked up the courage, shut his eyes and put his hand in to Mick the orangoutang’s hand.
They had stood holding hands for awhile before John had to go home sad at leaving his furry friend.
Before he left zoo that day John promised the orangoutang he would go back and see him.
He built up a relationship with Mick the giant orangoutang and John would often stand holding his hand telling him his problems when no one was around.
Mick would sit in his cage looking at John with big sad eyes as if he really understood everything that he was telling him. John wasn’t sure if he would still be able to go and see his friend once he left school and started work.
Chapter 6
Welcome to the World of Adulthood
John’s secondary education had not gone as well as he had wanted. He had played truant a number of times which had spoiled any chances that he might have had of getting an apprenticeship. When he left his school he managed to get a job in a wool merchants not far from his house and he was now working and earning a proper wage. John had just been glad to get away from his school.
One of the other boys in the warehouse soon showed John how to stack the sheep’s fleeces that the older men had clipped and cleaned for bailing. The job which was unskilled didn’t take long to learn.
The warehouse that John was working in had a gantry running around the inside of the building on two levels. The other workers would jump off the gantry which was fifty foot high at break times and land in the piles of wool which were stacked below. They kidded John on that he was afraid of hights to try and make him jump the same as them. He had looked down a number of times but he had continued to use the stairs.
John had made his mind up that if he was going to jump he would do it in his own time. A week later John decided that it was time for him to Jump and to do the same as the other workers.
He stood and looked down at he pile of fleeces below him before climbing on to the railings that run round the floor that he was on. He shut his eyes and launched himself off the top floor to start going down.
John felt the rush of air passing him as he dropped like a stone until he came to stop by landing in the pile of fleeces that had cushioned his fall. The workmen who had stood and watched him clapped when he climbed out of the wool and walked over to the canteen to start his tea break. He was flushed in the face, but happy at what he done.
The other workers congratulated him and patted him on the back when he walked in to the canteen.
John seldom used the stairs in the warehouse to go down to the bottom floor for his breaks after his first jump. He made new friends with the people that he was working with and started to socialise with the other boys by going to the pictures, dancing and the cafe with them.
John’s home life hadn’t improved any and the rows that he was having with his grandfather were becoming more intense.
He was rowing with his grandfather on an almost daily basis about money and his age. He felt that he should have been given more freedom because he was working and taking home a wage.
His grandfather had told him as long as he was living in his house he would do as he was told.
John’s grandparents had threatened to throw him out of their house a number of times, but they had never done it.
He didn’t like the rows and would try to keep out of the house as much as possible.
His friends in the areas that he been told not to go near were going through the same problems as he was and he put it down to his age.
The older men at John’s work would joke with the boys who were working there. Sometimes by going over the top and manhandling them.
John had made it clear to them that he wouldn’t take any nonsense from anyone. They treated what John said as a joke, but at the same time no one had ever touched him.
John’s own identity was starting to develop at the age of fifteen.
During their tea and lunch breaks John and his workmates would play cards for money in the canteen.
The morning tea breaks were taken up playing pontoons and at lunch times when they had longer they would play five card brag.
Sometime there was a lot of money in the kitty and John had won it a few times to the disgust of the older men who thought that they were the card sharps.
They didn’t know that John played cards in the cafe with his friends at nights. Some of the workmen would just sit and watch the card players playing while others sat and picked horses from the racing section of their papers.
John was starting to like the atmosphere at his work.
One of the older men grabbed John in a bear hug one day to try and poke fun at him. He had just won a game of cards and was going back to his work from the canteen to stack some fleeces.
The large workman who grabbed John had grabbed him face on to try and humiliate him in front of the other men who were standing watching. He squeezed John as hard as he could to show everyone how strong he was.
John asked the workman who towered above him to let him go. He just laughed and started to squeeze John even harder. John who was small for age lifted his leg and kicked him on the shin with his boot which had tacks in it.
The boot scraped up his shin removing the skin from his leg as it went. Such was the force of John’s kick that the workman screamed out in pain and let go to hold his leg which was bleeding.
As the workman hopped around the warehouse on his good leg he started to shout and swear at John to try and take control the situation in front of the other men who were standing around laughing at what had happened. .
John turned around and faced the other men square on before walking towards them. They stopped laughing when they realised that the joke had gone to far.
Mr Weir the foreman of the warehouse had come to see what the commotion was all about just as John was getting his jacket on to leave the warehouse. He told Mr Weir who stood with a brown coat and cap on what the other workman had done to him and why he was leaving the wool merchants for good.
John knew that he needed to get another job right away if he wasn’t going to have another row with his grandfather when he went home that night.
As he walked along the road he was saddened that his first job had come to such an abrupt end in the way that it had, but he was relieved that he had stood up for himself against an older person.
John was determined that no one would lay their hands on him now that he had left school and started work.
There was a waste paper factory near the wool merchants where John had been working and he had heard that it was always looking for staff. He decided to walk to it and find out if they were looking anyone.
When John arrived at the massive building he looked for the office so that he could ask the receptionist to see the manager.
It didn’t take Mr Martin the factory manager long to come off the factory floor and to take John in to the works canteen for an interview.
He wanted to ask some questions to see if he was suitable for a job.
John told Mr Martin that he had just left school and that he hadn’t had a job yet. He didn’t tell him about the problems that he had just experienced. John knew that if he did, he wouldn’t get the job that he so desperately needed.
Mr Martin who was a middle aged man asked John if he could start right away. He was taken around the factory by the manager who took him to the foreman that he would be working under.
The noise of the conveyor belts and machinery working made it hard to hear and the foreman had to shout to tell John what he would be doing.
Within half an hour John was happy to be back in employment and working as if nothing had happened.
When he went home and told his grandparents what had happened a row developed between John and his grandfather. John couldn’t understand why because he had stood up for himself like his grandfather had told him to do many times before.
His grandfather had told him to learn to fight his own battles when he was younger.
John’s grandmother brought his tea to the table as he was sitting watching the black and white television ignoring everything that his grandfather was saying. While John ate his tea his grandfather sat in his chair shouting at him that he couldn’t keep changing jobs at his age.
The job that John had got at the waste paper factory was a pound less than what he had been earning at the wool merchants and his grandparents were worried about such a drop in his income.
When he finished his tea John went through to the toilet and washed himself before going out to get away from the bickering.
John walked along the gas lit streets deep in thought before going to see his friend Carol who lived in Woodford Place. She was one of the friends that he had grown up with and who had understood him when he had any problems.
John thought to himself that his friends might have been poor, but they were always honest with themselves and anyone else who was around them.
They were the kind of people who had no airs and graces about themselves. Most of the people in Hillpark Street, Woodford Place, Northbrook Street and Monument street were hard working people. These were the people that his grandparents didn’t want him mixing with.
John had always found it hard to understand why his grandmother didn’t want him mixing with them because they lived in a poorer area of the city.
John went to Carol’s parents house to be told that she was out baby-sitting in someone else’s house that night. They told him where he could find her.
Carol was at a young couples house across the road from where she lived. John walked up the tenement stairs to the single end and found the house.
When he knocked on the door Carol invited John in to join her. He had hoped to steal a kiss from her if he was lucky.
They sat and talked to each other in the sparsely furnished single end until the baby was put in its cot for the night.
The single end only had a sideboard, wardrobe, two chairs, a bed coal fire and a radio in it. The cot with the baby in it was in the corner of the room. The floor had linoleum on it and a little rug at the fire.
The toilet which was in the stair was shared by six families on the top floor of the tenement..
John and Carol sat listening to Radio Luxembourg while taking about their hopes for the future. Carol had wanted to be a nurse when she left school, but like John she had ended up in a factory. She was an attractive girl who was the same age as John.
They had gone to school and grown up together. John asked Carol if she would kiss him. She told him that she had never kissed anyone before. John said he would show her.
After awhile Carol submitted to John who could be very persuasive.
They got up stood beside the window holding each other closely getting ready to kiss.
Carol and John had played together as children and he had been up to her mother and fathers house many times before.
They had often gone to the pictures with each other and they had put their arms around each other in the back row. But they had never gone any further. They were now at an age where they wanted to explore.
John had it in his mind that he was going to knock Carol off her feet, run away with her, marry her and live with her forever when he kissed her.
Carol and John stood close to the window and started to put their lips together. As Carol moved back to get away from her first kiss her backside edged closer towards the window.
John heard the sound of breaking glass. Carol had put her backside through the window. He was glad that she hadn’t hurt herself when pane of glass had broken and fallen out on to the street. But their kiss for the night was over as they looked at the hole where the glass had been.
They couldn’t do anything for laughing as they tried to work out an excuse for the young couple when they came back from their night out.
John left the house that Carol was baby-sitting in deeply embarrassed by his failed kiss.