CHAPTER ONE – SOOTBAGS 1
INFANT AND JUNIOR (ONE) 1952-1956
I still have my very first school prize. It is on my desk in front of me as I write.
It measures 15 cm by 11 cm. The cover is in tatters, and it is, in booksellers'
parlance, not just "slightly foxed" but "extremely foxed". The price on the inside
cover says "4/6 NET". That is, four shillings and sixpence in pre-decimal currency
and twenty-two and a half pence in today's. The inscription is in copper-plate
handwriting that has faded to brown. It says, "David Gibson. South Ferriby County
School. July 1953." I was six.
At that age, I had only a vague notion of the concept of School. It was a
place that my brother and sister went to while I stayed at home and played and my
mum did housework. My dad went to another place called Work. He had also been
to yet another place called War, from which he had returned. I wasn't sure what it
was, but I knew that a lot of men didn't come back from it. I had the fatalistic belief
that I would have to go there one day and that I would be one of the ones who
didn’t...
My first school prize was (and still is) called JAMES THE RED ENGINE and
is one in the Railway Series by the Rev.W. Awdry, with illustrations by C. Reginald
Dalby. It was published by Edmund Ward of Leicester in 1943, when Ringo Starr
was just 3 years old. I loved and read that little book almost literally to bits. I could
read when I was three years old, so I was well prepared for it by the time I was six.
We lived in a little cottage with no TV but lots of books. Both my parents (we called
them me mam and me dad) where avid readers and solvers of cryptic crosswords
– two habits that I am very happy to have acquired at an early age. In the
evenings, they would sit by the fireside reading. I loved this quiet, gentle activity
and wanted to join in. So I would pick up a book, open it and look at it. With one
eye on me mam and me dad, I would turn the page every time they did. One
evening, my mother said,
"David, what are you doing?"
"I am reading"
"Well, just a minute then."
And she carefully turned my book the right way up. Gradually, the black things on
the white pages started to make sense to me, so by the age of three, I could read
– or at least decode. My parents were very pleased about this and were more than
willing to encourage me. My dad was proud of this little squib who could read and
always ready to show me off. When relatives visited, he would stand me on a stool
and have me read the front page of The Daily Telegraph. I couldn't understand
half of it, but I could do it. (Understand. Once, around this time, when I had been
bad, my dad gave me a telling-off, concluding with,
"Do you understand?"
"Of course I do. I have to".
"You have to what?"
"I have to understand every time I look out of the window."
"What are you talking about?"
"When I want to look out of the window, I have to put the stool under the window
and stand on it. So I understand.")
Another time we were on a train. It must have been going to Scarborough.
We went there every third week in August so that my dad could spend every day
at the cricket festival. It was one of the old steam trains – I loved the smells that
surrounded them – and when it stopped at the station, my dad (showing off again)
said – "David, look out of the window and tell us the name of this station".
Our fellow-passengers in the carriage looked on in surprise as this little boy
struggled with the leather strap to open the window, stuck his head out and looked
up and down the platform, then turned around to solemnly announce –
"Gentlemen" (with a hard G.)
One Monday morning, when I was five, my mum woke me up and told me to
get dressed. She gave me my best clothes instead of my play clothes, and I said –
"What's this? We went to church yesterday. "
My mum said –
"You're going to school today."
I thought – school. OK. I'll give it a try. The school was only fifty or so yards from
our cottage on Low Street, and when we got there I was pleasantly surprised to
see a lot of my friends there. The school was built in 1874 and had three
classrooms – Infants, Lower Juniors, and Upper Juniors, separated by the Main
Hall. (There was only one hall.) There were two playgrounds, a big one for the
girls, Infants, and Lower Juniors, and a smaller one for the "big boys". (I hope this
isn't going to turn into "Cider with Rosie"). We went in through the infant's door and
I was told where to sit. My first teacher was Mrs Pocklington who lived in the
Manor Farm opposite the school. The first thing that impressed me about her was
her big squashy shoes.
What I remember about that first day after some vague preliminaries, is that
she set about teaching the alphabet. (Remember I'd been reading for 2 years.)
Around the walls of the classroom, the alphabet was displayed in pink letters on
beige ceramic tiles. We had to repeat, after Mrs Pocklington, and in chorus –
A-ah, B-buh, C-cuh, D-duh, E-eh, F-fuh, G-guh, H-huh...
And the morning and the afternoon were the first day. At home, I got out of my
best clothes, put on my play clothes, and went into the garden to play until my dad
came home from work and we had our tea.
Let me tell you about the house and the cottage that we lived in. It was
Elizabethan – Elizabeth Tudor, that is. It had a kitchen, a living-room, and two
bedrooms – for five of us. (I hope this isn't going to turn into Monty Python's "Four
Yorkshiremen".) There were two more rooms on the end occupied by great uncle
Horatio – "Raich". (More of him later – though where he came from remains a
mystery to me.) The kitchen had a small calor gas stove – my mother did most of
the cooking on the coal fire in the living room, a stone sink, a "safe" – which was a
small cupboard set into the wall with a mesh on the outside to keep things fresh.
No fridge. I also have a memory of one of those half-and-half stable doors that
was our back door. The living room was furnished with cheap "utility furniture" that
was available in the austerity years following World War II. The walls had beams
on the inside, and both bedrooms had sloping roofs, and eventually, dormer
windows. My parents had one, my sister and I shared the other. My brother had to
sleep on the landing at the top of the stairs on my dad's old army camp-bed. No
bathroom, no lavatory.
The front of the house was covered in roses, hence the name Rose Cottage.
There was a small, lush garden, carefully tended by my mum and dad, and a
small, sort of triangular lawn. Next door was "The big house" where my
grandmother Gibson lived. She had the bathroom that we used and an outside
lavatory. Actually, it was an earth closet, and once a week the man in the "dilly
cart" would come and empty it. I hated being in there because one day a large frog
hopped in and hid under the squares of newspaper that served as toilet paper. I
touched the top sheet and felt its scaly back. I have had a horror of frogs ever
since. After dark, if I wanted to do number twos, my dad would have to stand
guard on the door.
My gran's house was probably Edwardian or Georgian and it wasn't really
very big. (We called it the big house simply because it was bigger than ours, which
had been built as a farmer's cottage.) Downstairs, there were two rooms and a
kitchen which my granny called "scullery" and the pantry. There was also a washhouse
at the back with a boiler for washing sheets. My gran also kept coal in one
corner of the wash-house and there was a big tank of paraffin (which I will explain
later). The combined smells of coal dust and paraffin still evoke the 1950s for me,
and they were still there when I last visited the house in the year 2000.
Behind the house was an enormous (to me, at that age) garden and that
was my daily playground. As you came out of my gran's back door, the first thing
you saw was the rockery. My dad worked at the cement works and he had great
lumps of stone brought from the quarry. Among these lumps he grew Alpine plants
and flowers and I would spend hours playing with my little plastic soldiers among
the mountains, valleys, and caves. The next thing was the pig-sty. One end of it
was my dad's tool-shed and the other part had been cleaned out for us to play in.
There were blankets and cushions and me and my little "girlfriend" of the time
would go in there to play an innocent game of Mums and Dads. I don't remember
any pigs being around, but I do remember hooks in my grandmother's ceiling from
which sides of pork had once hung. Apparently, the family had once been almost
totally self-sufficient, because every native vegetable grew in that garden. There
were also about seven different varieties of apple-trees, pear-trees, and plum
trees, as well as all manner of soft fruits – raspberries, gooseberries, black
currants, redcurrants... but I don't remember any strawberries. In the "season of
mists and mellow fruitfulness" the whole family had to be out there picking, with my
dad up a ladder in the apple and pear trees.
We would lay the apples and pears out on newspapers on the floor of the
wash-house, then bag them up and sell them for a nominal sum. People refused to
accept them for nothing, but we had to get rid of them. Remember, these were the
austerity years (read David Kynaston) – the years of "waste not, want not" and
"make do and mend". I think I grew up on an almost exclusive diet of fruit. My
mum could put anything in a pie and I would eat it. I particularly liked her applepie,
although my sister wasn't too fond of the "spingles" they occasionally
contained.
One of her best pies was wild strawberry. The cement works was very
important to the village, and there was a quarry where the chalk was – er –
quarried and then conveyed to the works by the river where it was turned into
cement. There was also a disused quarry which we called "Cliff" and it was one of
our extremely dangerous playgrounds. In summer, a little group of us would go
along Cliff Road having been given jam-jars by our mums. We would pick for a
couple of hours, and walk back to the village. The trouble was that, by the time we
got back, we'd eaten most of them so we had to go back and refill the jars. Then
we would take them all to our house and my mum would bake five or six little pies
for my pals to come round and eat the next day. With custard. Ah!
We also grew rhubarb. Warning: do not eat it raw. Because if you do, there
is the strong possibility that you will then have to spend some time sitting on a
round wooden seat with a hole in the middle and the threat of frogs hopping
around your feet. There was one apple tree from which we were forbidden to eat.
(Let's go play Adam and Eve.) Apparently it was a very old and rare strain, and I
think the apples were called "Russets" – small brown fruit. And so, of course we
had to eat them just like Adam and Eve. We would stuff the cores down a drain so
that my dad wouldn't see them. They weren't very nice.
One of the things I liked most about the garden was when my dad gave me
a small patch about six yards square and said – "This is yours". He showed me
how to dig it and rake it and then taught me how to grow things like carrots, and
radishes and lettuces. You can imagine how proud I felt when my mum was
making a salad and asked me if I had a lettuce ready. I used to race around with
my little trowel in my hand and carry it back like a hunting trophy.
Anyway, let's go back to school. This is supposed to be about schools.
This next bit I'm sure you've heard or read before, but not from me. Lots of
people have told this little story – the latest I heard it was in an interview with a
brilliant Greek writer of children's books, Eugene Trivizas – but I promise you it is
true. I know because my mum told me about it many times, and telling lies to the
young is wrong, remember?
The next day, she woke me up again and gave me my good clothes.
"Where am I going today?" I asked.
"To school."
"Again? But I went yesterday!"
"You have to go everyday", she said as gently as ever.
"Everyday? How long for?"
"About twelve years.
And through my tiny mind passed the image of having to sit in that room for twelve
years going, "A-ah, B-buh, C-cuh..." Not long after of course, I found out there was
a bit more to it than that. The Old Stone Age, Latitude and Longitude, right-angled
triangles, seed dispersal, Mercator's projection, French irregular verbs – all that
sort of stuff.
Mrs Pocklington went away, retired I suppose, and Mrs Chapman came in
her place. It was love at first sight. (Everybody loves their Infant school teacher,
don't they?) She was pretty and had a sweet voice and wore shoes with quite high
heels. For some reason, the ink for the ink-wells was stored under the floorboards
of the Infants' classroom. We didn't use ink of course, that was for the big boys
and girls. We used pencils, and before that, slates on which we scratched the
letters of the alphabet and our "first words". About once a week, the ink-monitor
(how I longed to be a monitor of some kind) would come down to collect the ink to
fill up the ink-wells. There was a section of floorboard with holes in it so that he
could lift it up and take out something that looked like a watering can to fill up the
ink-wells in the other classroom. (Later on, I hated using that stuff. We had to use
pens made out of wood with steel nibs. The ink was made of powder mixed with
water, and every so often a lump would get stuck in your nib and explode on the
page. Trouble.) To go back to that section of floorboard. Every time Mrs Chapman
went over there, I watched fascinatedly wondering what would happen if one of
her heels went down one of the holes. I don't have many more images of the
Infants', as two years went by.
We moved next door to the Lower Juniors. Miss Usher. Elsie May Usher.
EMU. Ha! I already knew Miss Usher. She was the church organist and the
Sunday school teacher. When I was a bit older I used to go to her house on my
own for lessons of the Bible. I quite enjoyed doing that because I liked this kind
lady, even though she smelled dusty and her teeth had a greenish tinge to them. I
suppose the Gibsons were a "big" church family in those days. We had our own
pew (second from the back on the left-hand side) and just about all of Sunday was
spent on church activity. After I had been confirmed at the age of eleven, we all
used to go to Holy Communion at eight o'clock in the morning. I can't have been
paying much attention during confirmation classes, because when the Vicar
(Montague Labon Hunt) put a small round wafer on my tongue and told me it was
the body of Christ, and when the wine of the chalice touched my lips and he told
me it was the blood of Christ, I freaked out. (Although the expression had yet to be
coined.) I didn't understand symbolism.
After communion, we went home for a quick breakfast. You weren't
supposed to eat before the service, so there was a lot of tummy-rumbling during it.
Then at nine o'clock I went to Sunday school in the church Institute with Miss
Usher and most of the kids from the village. (My mum also taught the little ones
there, and what happened when I was about sixteen was to direct the rest of my
life.) We were back in church for the morning service – Matins. After lunch, which
we called dinner, I was back at Sunday school at two o'clock. Then we had a
break until half past six when we climbed the hill again for Evensong. (The church
was built in Saxon times and was ruined in the 16th century when the foundations
slipped around so it was facing south and not east.) After Evensong, when I was a
bit older about six of us (all boys) went to the Rectory for Bible class with Mrs
Hunt, while the Reverend watched TV in another room. Mrs Hunt was nice, but
what we did was fairly boring. I suppose the reason we had to go was to keep us
off the streets on a Sunday night and to stop us from getting into trouble and doing
wicked things – like smoking. It didn't work. Later, when we were teenagers (a
word that had not long been invented) she taught us a mysterious card game
called Bezique and let us have a glass of sherry. When ten o'clock came we went
in to say good night to the Rev. and left for home. A nice gentle couple with two
grown-up daughters – Anne and Rachel – who I suppose I fancied with a feeling of
guilt. So that was Sunday, eight in the morning until ten at night.
Quite early on, I was drafted into the church choir. When we were all still in
the family pew, I used to pretend that my hands were the toy cars that I wasn't
allowed to take. I couldn't understand a word of what was being said at the front.
But once you were in the choir stalls you had to pretend to pay attention and
understand because you were visible to the whole congregation.
The boys wore black cassocks and white surplices. Fairly soon, I was moved
from the stalls and into a "box" and given in the job of "taking the collection up".
This meant that during the last hymn of Evensong I had to take a silver plate with
four bags (I can't remember what we called them) and stand in front of the choir
stalls while three men came and took one each and went round the congregation
collecting money. I took the fourth and went round the choir. Then I would wait for
the men to bring the (not so full) bags and put them on my silver plate to take to
the altar for the Vicar to bless, after which I would bow and return to my "box". (My
sister used to say that when I bowed it looked as if I was sweeping the altar steps
with my fringe.)