Those Were The Days

A Memory of Cookridge.

I moved to Ireland Wood from Portsmouth when I was 4 years old with my Mum and dad who was in the navy. We lived at 42 Raynel Way. The house was built by the Council. Most of the houses like ours were made of prefabricated concrete panels.
The houses were little better than a freezer. There was no such thing as insulation, heat pumps, double glazing and central heating to keep the place warm. All we had was a simple open fireplace where most of the heat went up the chimney. Even if stoked up when we went to bed, it soon went out.
In winter my mum hung the washing in the kitchen. When we got up it was so cold the clothes were frozen solid. When we went to bed, we could see our breath as vapour cloud.
If we left water in the sink, it was frozen solid in the morning. The windows were coated in a layer of ice inside the house. In fact, Yorkshire was so cold in winter that they had to chip the dogs off the lamp posts!
The funny thing is we rarely got sick. It’s a wonder to me though, how we survived the cold. We were made tough in those days.
When I was five, I started school. It was at the top of Farrar Lane on Otley Old Road. It was just two huts overshadowed by the reservoir bank.
In those days there were no such things as pre-schools or Kindergartens, so for us our first day at school was the first time we had been on our own away from home and mother.
Most mothers did not work outside the home, so it was also their first time away from us. As a result, this was a very traumatic time for both of us.
All I can remember about starting school is a room full of wailing children.
The headmistress was a Mrs Bray, who chain smoked in the class room, but who was a very kind person. How she eventually managed to calm us down I’ll never know, but she did.
I can remember two teachers at my first school. One was a lovely kind soul called Mrs Rhine. I loved being in her class. The other was a frightening fearsome tyrant called Mrs Windsor. I was convinced she was a witch. I still shudder thinking of her today.
If you misbehaved, she made you write out twenty lines such as “I must learn to behave”. If you didn’t read correctly or got other things wrong Mrs Windsor would either whack you over the knuckles with a ruler, or put a conical dunce's cap on you and make you stand in a corner in the front of the class, like below. I’m not kidding!
Have you ever heard the saying “’When I was a kid, we had to walk barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways to school?’
Well, we really did, although we did have shoes. At the age of five I had to walk through snow sometimes 2 -3 metres high on either side of the cleared route.
I had to do the journey four times a day allowing for journeys to and from home for lunch. The journey was 3.2 kms each journey, so 12.8 kms a day.
We walked without our parents. No one owned cars except the rich so there was no being mollycoddled like kids today and dropped off at the school gate by our parents.
My school was below the water tower building and consisted of two wooden huts and wooden girl’s and a boy’s toilet. The girl’s toilet had a knot hole in it and the naughty boys (not me) would peep through this at the girls.
During school we would have visits from the school nurse.
The nit nurse as we called her, used to make regular visits to check for headlice. We would all have line up to be examined in turn. Our hair was combed carefully with a nit comb to see if there was any infestation.
There were also routine eye and hearing tests, and visits by a school dentist, all free. I used to dread the dentist visit. Their tools were crude. Being in the dentist’s chair was like being tortured.
These days, where political correctness reigns, children can’t be vaccinated against anything without parental consent.
When I were a lad consents were not needed. Vaccines were given routinely.
It was an age of innocence. We read books such as Little black Sambo and Ten Little Niggers, books that are banned today. We didn’t know what racial prejudice was so never gave it a thought. To us the books were just a story.
I also loved Noddy and Big Ears books by Enid Blyton.
Weirdly, today Noddy and Big Ears have been accused of being gay by some critics, because they lived together and shared the same bed.
Our time was an age of innocence free from any thoughts of sexuality. Those kind of thoughts never even entered our heads.
How times have changed due to the media, where today sexual issues are put before children constantly. Noddy and Big ears were not gay in children’s eyes, until the media told them so.
The school closed in I think 1951 when we were transferred to a big modern school Ireland Wood primary.
A lot of the time we went to a nearby field along Farrar lane and simply played soccer, cricket, or touch rugby. Balls were made from leather, as tough as rhino hide and when they got wet were as heavy as lead. Cricket was played without pads.
We did lots of walking to interesting places like ponds, where we got frog spawn and raised them into frogs or caught stickleback fish which we sold to younger ones.
After a while we had to stop this because the fish usually died with-in a day or two and the buyers’ parents eventually ganged up, knocked at my Mum’s door and demanded we pay their kids back.
A favourite place we went to was a place called Horseshoe woods because it was shaped like a horseshoe. It was a public Right-of-Way across farmland, but narrow. As narrow as it was, you still had the feeling of walking through a wooded area.
The woods had lots of earth mounds in them. Grown-ups told us that goblins and fairies lived in the mounds and elves lived in the trees and we believed them. That’s why we were always going there, because we wanted to see them. We never did of course, but once, when we saw some movement, we thought we had. It was a fox!
If we had girls with us, we would tell them to sit on top of a mound to watch for goblins. We then sneaked up behind them and touched them on the shoulder to make them scream. Such fun!
Wild raspberries grew in the woods. We crushed them in water we had in a lemonade bottle to make an amazing drink. You know I can still imagine the refreshing taste today. The simple things in life are often the best.
Another favourite place for fishing and adventures in woodland was a park called Golden Acre Park pictured below. It covers 179 acres of mature woodlands and gardens surrounding a beautiful lake
Paul’s pond was place where we caught tadpoles and frogs.
However, there were also blood sucking leeches in this pond.
We first discovered this when a lad called Michael Millington waded in and came out with about 6 of the leeches stuck on his legs sucking his blood.
We were horrified and he almost fainted.
We had a pen knife on us and pricked them off. None of us ever waded into the pond again.
Farrar lane was about 500 meters from where I lived. It was a lad’s paradise. It ran through farmer Perkins' land and was lined by oak trees at the bottom end and dog roses edging the field at the top end.
To one side was a field where farmer Perkins grazed cows, and where we played soccer, touch rugby and cricket. In spring it was beautiful as it sprouted wild daisies, buttercups, harebells, poppies and a few corn flowers which we picked for our Mums.
We climbed the trees and played cowboys and Indians. We used homemade bows and arrows.
We got a willow branch and somehow, we would beg, borrow or scrounge a length of string and then we had everything we needed. You had to tie the string to one end of the willow branch, and bend it to get the string taut enough. The arrows were a piece of cane or straight tree branch tipped with a dart end.
Then we were off, with our parents' warnings of, "Be careful with that thing! Don't come crying to me if you shoot some kid's eye out!" ringing in our ears.
Anything was a legitimate target. Trees, cats, dogs, other kids ... but we never managed to actually hit anything other than trees. However, there was one exception.
I remember my friend Michael Millington, the one who got leeches on his leg, shooting his arrow to hit a tree from about 20 metres and it hit me in the side instead and went deep in but missed vital organs. He never thought it would hit me. I fell to the ground bleeding and he was panicking, convinced he had killed me. Thankfully I survived.
We had homemade catapults too, made from a forked tree branch and thick rubber with a piece of leather or thick material for a sling the pebble fitted into. They were deadly weapons really, from which we fired small pebbles, hoping to hit rabbits or tin cans. Whilst we managed to hit tin cans, we never hit any rabbits and I’m happy to report no humans.
For a month or so before bonfire night we used to go into the many woods around Ireland Wood and Cookridge to get dead branches and go round the neighbourhood to collect any old wooden things we could use to burn that people wanted to get rid of. It was called “chumping”
Each gang in the neighbourhood would try to outdo the other. The Jarvis gang were nearest to us and were always trying to raid our stock pile of chumps. I’m sure Brian and David Jarvis will remember this and have a good chuckle. It was a friendly rivalry though without the violence you get with today’s gangs.
Our area was a very poor area yet you could leave your doors and windows open all day and night. No one stole from each other and I never heard of any of the local shops being burgled.
Poverty is a relative thing. So, as everyone around us was is in the same state as us we didn’t feel like we were underprivileged.
Another thing that caused people to not feel hard done by was rationing. From the 1940’s until 1954 food was so short it was rationed and this was a great equalizer.
Rationing meant that you couldn’t buy more than your share of the rationed items. Even if you had a little more money than someone else you still couldn't buy more than your ration. You had to have the right coupons to buy items like sugar, sweets, tea, cheese, eggs etc
We did our shopping at the first shops on our estate which were little more than a big garage. Bennetts the butchers, Mrs Holehouse’s post office paper and sweet shop and Merryman’s the grocers. What a luxury it was when rationing ended and we could buy as many lollies as our pocket money allowed. Yes times were tough but all us lads living in Ireland Wood had the best environment to grow up in that you could ever wish for.

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