I wish my sister Eileen and her husband John from Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire a happy wedding anniversary. The happy couple tied the knot 57 years ago. Now if anyone deserves being awarded the ‘staying power’ medal of the year it is this couple. They exemplify the loving strength of all marriages which are bonded by Care, Compromise, and Commitment. Have a happy day, you two. Billy xxx
We wish a happy birthday today to Tria McGinley who lives in Summerhill, Meath, Ireland: Happy birthday to Dawn C. Boyer who lives in Riverside, California, America: Happy birthday to Breda T.Tobin who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Happy birthday to Eugene Connolly who lives in the village of my birth. Portlaw, Waterford, Ireland. We wish you all a happy birthday Tria, Dawn, Breda, and Eugene. Enjoy your special day and thank you for being my Facebook friend.
My song today is ’Show Me’, This record is the title track of the 1967 album by Joe Tex, who also wrote the song. The single was Joe Tex's fourteenth release to make the ‘US R&B Chart’. ‘Show Me’ went to Number 24 on the ‘R&B Chart’ and Number 35 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart’.
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When I was a young boy, living on the council estate, we would play in gangs like youngsters always have done. During the summer months of the long school holidays, very few families from the working classes went away on vacation; holidays away were a luxury of the wealth. There might be an odd day snatched on a seaside outing at Blackpool or Scarborough, but as far as having a week away in a boarding house, forget it! That was a life for rich folk who did not live on council estates. The only break most children from working-class families on our estate could ever look forward to would be the six weeks off during school summer holidays. Holidays were effectively holey days or days with holes in them that we filled up.
During summer holidays, unlike current times, the sun always seemed to shine, and would be cracking the flags between 8:00am and 8:00 pm. It was as though God always took pity on the poor by giving us an abundance of fresh air and healthy exercise, along with sun galore all summer long. He would save the rain in obeyance until our return to school during the September months. Every school holiday period between July and August would be the same; filled with fun, sun, and loads of excitement, adventure, and stuffed to the gills with thrills and spills. In fact, the only thing left empty from going out first thing in the morning until we got back home in the evening would be our stomachs. The only food to enter our mouths until we arrived back home would comprise of apples raided from orchards, broad beans and peas or a turnip pinched from a farmer’s field, or a bun shoplifted from the counter of a distracted baker or grocer! We would often spend ten hours looking after ourselves, aided by our powers of imagination and creativity. Our sheer inventiveness always provided our playthings and nature and the world around us provided our arena.
Each morning, every boy in the gang would call around to their friend’s house before 8:30 am and we would usually go out the door eating a slice of bread and jam as we made our way down ‘Green Lane’. There could be as many as thirty boys, and we were never fewer than a good dozen. Green lane comprised of acres of fields, a maze of hedgerows, a disused quarry, bluebell wood, and lots of hills with long grass to hide within to ambush approaching armies. A few miles away was located the secret grave of Robin Hood, within the grounds of Kirklees Manor (which I have personally looked for several times but never found). I have been fired upon by the blunderbuss of the gamekeeper of Kirklees Manor a few times when we have trespassed in the Kirklees woods
We would be heavily armed during our excursions into the woods with catapults (from which we would fire glass and lead marbles), and we carried homemade bows and arrows (with darts used as lethal arrowheads), and some boys held long wooden staffs (hewn thick tree branches or brush handles). We were also armed with homemade swords and dustbin lids, and there was always a couple of boys with air rifles. I am sure that the large numbers of boys going down the fields during those summer days were not only looking for the excitement of fighting recreated wars, but many were half hoping that someone might get hurt enough to maintain the interest of the occasion, and provide gossip for the weeks ahead.
During our day’s outing, we would recreate wars where a combatant would be only be considered killed whenever he uttered the word ‘Surrender’ or was rendered unconscious, or an ambulance was needed to be called out to take the injured boy to the hospital. I recall many mates being carried home by two or three friends, having hurt themselves badly. It was ‘a given’ that not one boy would ever negotiate the wars of the summer months without acquiring a broken or fractured limb, and a permanent body or facial scar. There would always be the obligatory hospital visit by a minimum of three boys from a gang of twelve, and it was never unknown for one member from our gang to be an inpatient at the local hospital when the rest of us returned to our schools after the summer holiday. I can still recall one summer after exploring and climbing in a disused quarry, one boy fell thirty feet and survived with broken limbs. Another boy fired an arrow during one of our summer battles and it stuck in the head of a mate who was ambulanced to the hospital. One boy had a large stone dropped on him from the first floor of a disused mill and was hospitalised for weeks. Fractured and broken limbs and ribs came with the territory and were viewed as being trophies of our summer holidays off school.
Our childhoods were tough but so were we, and I would not have missed one day of them for the world. Our days were filled to the brim with excitement, sheer exhilaration, and lots of danger; although none of us ever focussed upon the possible risks we took with our over-realistic battles and adventures. It was not unknown to have twenty to thirty boys split into two armies of armed combatants do battle from dawn until dusk. When we arrived home at the end of a long summer’s day, we would have torn clothes, dirty hands, and grazed faces, and our legs would be bloodied and newly scarred. We would be so tired, starving for something to eat, and as mucky as a miner, but have greatly enjoyed our summer’s day. With no more than a vivid imagination and things which can be found around any home, in any wood, field or on any building site, for the better part of a decade we would create our own games and design our own activities. I cannot remember ever seeing a fat boy on the estate in all the years I lived there! Indeed, the only fat boy I was ever acquainted with during my childhood years was the comical character of Billy Bunter I read about in books and comics!
When we left home on a morning during school holiday months, all our mothers knew that there was no point wasting their breath by telling us to be home at mid-day for something to eat. Our mothers knew that they would be lucky to catch sight of us again before bedtime. Between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm every Monday to Friday during our summer school holidays, mums would not see neither hair nor head of their sons between breakfast and teatime. I can already see the young reader under the age of sixty scratch their heads as they try to figure out where ‘lunchtime’ and dinner disappeared to. Allow me to fill you in on some of the subtle changes in custom and language between the 1950s and today, 2021.
In the early 1950s, the meals eaten between the working-class and the middle-class households varied substantially in both nourishment and title. What the poor called ‘teatime’, the rich called ‘dinner’, and as for ‘lunch’(a term I cannot recall ever hearing until I was in my mid-twenties), we never knew about. Between breakfast and tea was space that remained unfilled. If we were lucky, there might be a glass of milk to go to bed on, and only then if you were a child who never wet the bed. Whereas the rich considered ‘variety’ to be their spice of life when it came to meals, the working classes enjoyed ‘much of the sameness’. The number of mealtimes enjoyed any week of the year by working-class families would always be determined by what day of the week it was, and how much more mum could persuade the grocer to give her ‘on the tick’ until dad next got paid.
Our daily food intake would usually be the same thing for breakfast, teatime, and supper; and comprise of bread and jam (no butter or margarine in between the bread and the sparsely spread jam). Variations on the jam filling (which was considered a luxury in many households) might include fish paste or potted meat if we were lucky. If ever mum cooked something warm it would be a plate of potatoes, with the occasional treat of a slice of corn beef or spam. I always remember that our corn beef would come in tins that were either badly bulged and dented or had a faulty can-opening tab. There was rarely a label on the outside of the can to tell anyone eating the contents what was on the inside. The tins of squashed corn beef looked more like they had been run over by a lorry instead of having fallen off the back of one. We got them in that condition because they were cheaper than regular-shaped cans of corn beef, just like we would also get end-of-day loaves of bread from the bakers. There were no such luxuries as fridges in my youth; there being no practical purpose for them. Houses had larders that comprised of one wooden shelf in a cubby hole that had a tin of carnation milk, half a loaf of bread, a packet of salt and a half-emptied jar of Robinson’s jam! I never saw the point of larders for families who had no food to store.
Very occasionally, on a weekend, dad would get a boiled egg to eat for his breakfast, and being the oldest of seven children, I would have his topping which I would urge him to slice off generously and not bash the head in. The only time we tasted meat was when we took a bite from our brother’s leg! On the few family occasion, we had meat to eat, it would not be steak, pork, lamb, or a nice roast, but a pig’s head or pig’s trotters. Like the original American natives who killed the buffalo and used every part of the beast, so would mum. The pig’s head would be boiled in a huge pot for hours until the meat literally fell off the skull without slicing. Then the bones of the skull would be boiled again for hours extracting the marrow within. Then, the rich marrow would be watered down to go farther, thereby providing the Forde family with soup for the rest of the week, reheated daily.
I recall after I started working in the mill and I tipped up my weekly wage to supplement dad’s wage, I would get a bacon and egg cooked breakfast every Saturday morning! This was the treat I best remembered and is no doubt my favourite meal today.
Though we never had what children today have come to expect, we had much more than they will ever know. The absence of things not then in existence in our lives such as televisions, record players, portable radios, laptops, computers, etc were never missed because we never had them. What we possessed instead of all today’s mod cons was a vivid imagination. We did not have today’s fast food, but we did have the fastest athletes in the world, and it was my generation who first witnessed Roger Bannister break the four-minute mile, by running it in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds in May 1954, and before the 1970s, the first man would land on the moon!
Not once in my life, until I left home at the age of 21 years, did I start or end a day without my mother telling me that she loved me, and without me feeling loved. My love received was demonstrably shown to me by my parents and my mother in particular. Love needs to be said! Love needs to be felt! Love needs to be shown!
Love and peace
Bill xxx