Looking back, Christmas to my child’s mind was a rich stew of smells and sensations. The table groaned for the one and only day of the year under the unexpected weight of food. Men I otherwise saw in their working clothes and pit muck turned up in tight blue suits and Co-op shoes, and aunties with new hair-dos seemed suddenly aware of what they’d kept under their pinafores all year long. The air was heavy with Soir de Paris and the promise of mischief.
The sharpest memories of Christmas in those days are the football matches. It seemed to me that Barnsley never stopped playing football over Christmas and I never missed a match.
Christmas matches were different altogether. In the bus going to the ground, men would be wearing new scarves and gloves and they smoked cigars instead of Woodbines. In the ground the normal smell of stale beer was replaced with a whisky aroma from a thousand miniature bottles, which were produced from inside pockets and offered surreptitiously to the man next door in the way they might proffer a glimpse of a dirty postcard.
In fact, two or three games would be played over the Christmas period and often the players appeared as imbued with the Christmas spirit as the spectators. There was one famous Boxing Day game when one of our team, a man not unknown in certain licensed premises in Barnsley, set the ball down for a free kick and, as he walked steadily backwards to prepare his run-up, collided with the low wall separating the pitch from the spectators, and fell backwards into the crowd. He was caught by spectators who later swore he fell asleep in their arms. Much later, having been revived, he stumbled making a tackle and fell to earth holding his leg. As our trainer ran on to the field someone shouted, ‘Don’t revive him! Bury the sod!’
Christmas games were derby days – Rotherham United, Sheffield Wednesday, Doncaster Rovers and, best of all, Chesterfield. In those days before crowd segregation, the anticipation of going to a match was in standing next to visiting fans and hearing their take on the game. Playing for Chesterfield at the time were the Capel brothers. Tommy, the really gifted one, was the captain. Chesterfield were awarded a late penalty and Tommy Capel selected his brother to take the kick to win the game. He shot hopelessly wide whereupon one Chesterfield fan standing next to us turned to his companion and said, ‘Nepotism. That’s what lost us the game, bloody nepotism.’
None of us knew what he meant. We didn’t laugh, mainly because we thought it had something to do with incest. It wasn’t until we got home and searched the dictionary we got the joke.
The next ritual on my father’s calendar was the start of the shooting season. Every year, the mine-owners would gather with a few cronies and shoot our wildlife. They continued the slaughter even after the mines were nationalised. We lived opposite the gamekeeper, a small bow-legged man called Athey Crossley. He was the man who killed the pig for us every Christmas. My father was employed as a beater and from a very early age I went along with him. When I was big enough I was given a pick handle to try to bash the rabbits we startled as we clumped through the countryside towards the guns. The rabbits were ours to eat if we were successful.
It always seemed to me incongruous that we should be walking towards the pithead gear and slag heaps of Grimethorpe Colliery for the amusement of armed men, while deep down, beneath our feet, miners were getting coal. One day, walking through a field of stubble towards the guns, before my dad took me down the pit, I asked him what it was like deep underground.
‘Blacker than a crow’s arse,’ he said, and left it at that.
It was when it came to summer holidays my father’s gift for creating drama out of the commonplace flourished in the most spectacular manner. We took our holidays in August, Barnsley Feast Week, when the whole village upped and went away like some Indian tribe moving reservations. The destination varied. The majority went across the Pennines to Blackpool, the rest headed for the east coast – Cleethorpes, Bridlington, Filey and particularly Scarborough. We were east-coast people because my father only went to seaside resorts where the sands were suitable for beach cricket. Like some inspector of wickets he had, during his time, closely examined the west-coast beaches and found them unfit for play. The east coast, notably Scarborough, Bridlington and Filey, were declared first class.
Thus it was that during my youth, whenever we went on holiday, we resembled some MCC party heading for a three-month tour of the West Indies. We were easily discernible from the rest of the mob at the railway station, being the only family with a full set of stumps strapped to our suitcase. Mother’s carrier bag was full of balls and both Father and I carried cricket bats. Indeed, a photograph of the time, taken at Bridlington shortly after our arrival, shows father and son strolling down the promenade, one carrying a Frank Sugg and the other a Gunn and Moore, looking for all the world like Sutcliffe and Holmes walking out to open for Yorkshire at Park Avenue, Bradford.
One of the outstanding features of our holidays was that play started as soon as we stepped off the train and continued through every daylight hour until it was time to go home again. My childhood memories of those days are of burning beaches and large men trying to bowl me out. Misery was rain and shelter in the amusement arcade and the smell of cheap raincoats and human damp. The success of the holiday depended entirely on how much cricket we could get in and, even more important, how many games we won. Here it should be explained to occasional participants of bat and ball on the sands that our version of beach cricket was the equivalent of a five-day Test match between England and Australia, or at least as important as the War of the Roses.
My old man took his cricket very seriously, as befitted a Yorkshire man, team captain and tour organiser. His first job after arrival was to make an immediate recce of the beach to lay claim to the best batting strip. Then he would mark out the wicket and, with my mother acting as wicket keeper, using her coat to stop the ball, he would bowl a few overs at me. This activity invariably attracted onlookers who would be invited to play by my old man in order that he might make a shrewd assessment of their worth. Outstanding talents would be immediately signed on for the coming week, but only if their antecedents matched their ability. Simply stated, he would have anyone playing in his team provided they didn’t come from Lancashire. This chauvinism was deliberately designed to stir up tribal warfare and always ended in the highlight of our week, a challenge from a team of Lancastrians who were bitter and disgruntled about being turned down because of an accident of birth.
They never won. The fact was that my father was a magnificent beach cricketer with a profound knowledge of the tactics needed to achieve success in this kind of game. For instance, he won many a game by his keen study of the east-coast tides. The importance of this can be gauged from the fact that in our kind of beach cricket the edge of the sea was always a boundary.
Thus, on a morning with the tide receding, if the old man won the toss, he would put the other side in. By the time they had exhausted themselves trying to hit a six into the fast disappearing sea, the tide would change, and we would have the comparatively easy task of lobbing boundaries into the oggin while their fielders were distracted by the fear of being cut off by the onrushing waves. My dad never lost a game of beach cricket and when the time came to retire from the pit, he devoted his life to coaching his grandchildren in the mysteries of the greatest game. He had spectacular success.
Much later, when I was off working abroad with television, my parents would stay at our house to help Mary with the kids. This was my father’s idea of paradise. After one trip he could hardly wait for me to get through the door before inviting me into the garden to see the progress he had made with my middle son, Nicholas, who was ten at the time. Nicholas was a slow bowler and his granddad had already taught him how to spin a ball from leg.
‘See how he’s come on since you went away,’ said my dad, handing me a bat.
My son bowled three respectable leg breaks and then skidded one through to hit my leg.
‘That’s his top spinner and you are plumb lbw,’ said my dad.
‘Nonsense, it hit a pebble,’ I said.
‘You’ll see,’ said Father.
Next ball was a leg break, or so I thought. Instead it turned the other way and bowled me. I looked at my ten-year-old.
‘That was my goggly. Granddad showed me how to do it,’ said my son.
My father had a smile that went right round his face and ended at the back collar stud.
Later on John Boorman, the film director, used the incident in his film
Hope and Glory
to symbolise the way some families use the sporting rather than the Gregorian calendar to mark the passing of time.
An irregular part of my father’s social calendar was a visit to London. We sometimes dossed down in Auntie Florrie’s cold-water flat, up two flights of stairs above a pie shop, between King’s Cross and St Pancras Station. She had returned home after working at Rogerthorpe Manor during the war and been reunited with husband Harry, who had stayed in London and kept on working as a messenger for a newspaper in Fleet Street.
I saw Grub Street for the first time through his eyes, and I saw it as it should be seen, standing outside El Vino’s looking down the street and up to Saint Paul’s. I didn’t realise at the time that it would be, for a short but significant period, my place of work, and it would be a toss up whether El Vino’s or the
Daily Express
would have the more significant effect on my career.
It would be untrue to say my father’s obsession with a visit to the capital was due to a love of the place. London to him meant three things: Lord’s, Wembley and The Oval. He took my mother to London for a couple of days for their honeymoon. She was overwhelmed at the prospect of seeing the city for the first time. She didn’t realise there was a Test match in progress and she spent two days at Lord’s.
It was a fair introduction to life with Father.
Another time, upon arrival in London, we were whisked to the theatre to see the Ink Spots perform. They were an American close harmony group, popular at the time, and my father’s favourite singers. Their big hit was a sentimental song called ‘Whispering grass’. ‘Why do you whisper green grass? What makes the wind stir you so?’
I can remember the lyric clearly, sixty years on, only because my father sang it every day. Indeed he joined in at the theatre, singing the bass part, which brought him a visit from the manager who threatened to evict him if he didn’t stop humming.
Another time my mother, who loved musicals, took us to see the original production of
Kismet
. She also introduced me to the treasures within the Great American Songbook
.
She loved the Astaire movies and bought all the recordings of the tunes by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. They were the lullabies of my infancy. By the time I was five of six I knew more Gershwin songs than I did nursery rhymes.
Every year I bought my mother a record for her birthday. It would be by Crosby or Sinatra, singing a classic, or sometimes I’d buy one by Andre Kostalanetz and some massive orchestra playing a selection of Hollywood hits. The only time I displeased her was when I was fifteen or sixteen and I gave her ‘All the things you are’ played by Charlie Parker. She said she had never heard anything like it.
Nor had I.
5
GRAMMAR SCHOOL SENTENCE
Miss Turpin, my teacher at junior school, had done a remarkable job. My eleven plus results were so good I had been awarded a place in the Express stream at Barnsley Grammar School, which meant we took the School Certificate in four years instead of five. We also had to learn three foreign languages instead of two.
I didn’t like the place. For one thing I had been previously taught by women, in the main caring and nurturing. Now I was in an all-male world, instructed by short-tempered brutes who, when all else failed, would try to beat information into you. The specialist at this form of teaching was our German master, Goodman, an angry-looking man whose favoured form of instruction was to emphasise a point by drilling his knuckle into the top of a boy’s head. Alternatively, he would raise you to your feet by hoisting you up by your hair. If he considered a boy to be particularly stupid, he would make him stand by the blackboard and belittle him by asking questions he knew he couldn’t answer. We had double German on Monday mornings, the prospect of which would turn my bowels to water as I walked to school from the bus station. If there was a particular reason why I disliked grammar school, Goodman was at its source.
They weren’t all like that. There was the odd gentle soul. We had a music teacher whose lesson consisted of playing Mozart’s piano concertos and ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ over and over again. He never analysed, simply listened, his face reflecting the mood of the music. He instilled in me a lifelong love of Mozart and gave me an early introduction to the world of classical music. On the other hand, I can’t speak German. There is a lesson there.
An English teacher who was keen on drama cast me as Mrs Cratchit in an adaptation of Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
. My appearance wearing a grey wig and a black dress made out of old black-out curtains was greeted with derision by mates in the audience. They particularly enjoyed my ad lib during the serving of the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner when my husband Bob Cratchit forgot his line. I covered with: ‘Would anyone like stuffing?’ A critic wrote, ‘There was much audience sympathy for Mrs Cratchit who last week scored a hat trick for Darfield Road Juniors and whose father is well known in the local cricket circles.’
Best of all the teachers was the sports master, Webb Swift, a large and craggy man who was good enough to play football and cricket at professional level. The first time I came across him he was bowling in the nets to youngsters who were hoping to make the Under-14 team. His first ball to me was a little short of a length and, being young and full of madness, I went for a hook and missed by a mile. It didn’t seem that important to me and I was therefore a little taken aback on returning the ball to see the master, hands on hips, staring at the sky. He remained like that for some time, lips moving silently, and then he looked at me.