Edmondscote Road part 2
BOLTED
Bathrooms played a major part in my infancy. I caused floods with flannels, broke loo seats through ill-advised climbing adventures and during a birthday party caused much consternation by taking a girl called Helen up to the bathroom and locking ourselves in with the two guinea pigs she had brought me as a present. I tipped the cardboard box containing the creatures out onto the floor without realising it did not only contain the two rodents but vast quantities of straw, a water bowl, thousands of minute food grains and immeasurable amounts of hard, black, guinea pig poo. It took an age for my mum to clean up whilst trying to entertain, feed and water fifteen six year olds, many of whom wanted to use the bathroom.
Each year we took an interminable trip to Edinburgh. It was to visit my father's relations. I was incarcerated with my mother and sister in the deluxe side car of dad’s Triumph motor bike as we burnt away the twisting miles of the A1. One year were heading off to stay in Aunt Nancy's flat near Dalkeith. We arrived tired, deafened and travel sick from the eight or nine hours it had taken us and dizzy from flying over the humped backed bridges we had encouraged dad to accelerate over and from swerving around sharp bends as he tried to beat the failing summer light. We arrived at Aunt Nancy's pristine home. She was away for the summer and had left us the run of the place.
Crystal ornaments perched delicately on glass shelves and imposing pictures of the "Monarchoftheglen" or was it "Thestagatbay?" hung in the hall. Val and I had been given strict instructions about the flat and warned against fingerprints on the wallpaper and making sure we removed our shoes before entering. All went well until about half way through the week. On leaving the pine scented, bright blue and pink bathroom exactly as I had found it, I closed the door rather vigorously somehow causing the shiny brass bolt to jolt across. I was unaware of this until my mother tried to use the facility. Since all the family was accounted for on our side of the door, an intruder was initially suspected. Eventually inquiries into who had used the bathroom last directed attention rapidly and inexorably, towards me.
I had always been advised by my parents that if you didn't tell the truth you would eventually be found out anyway. " You will get into far less trouble if you own up now." On this premise, I freely confessed to being the last user and the tension that had been building up in my mother during her nervous guardianship of the apartment finally exploded. I fervently wished myself up a remote Scottish mountain walking alongside 'Themonarchoftheglen.'
My suggestion that I should climb up the drainpipe and get in through the window was initially dismissed but ultimately adopted as ‘Plan B’. ‘Plan A’ was for my father to shin the twenty feet or so up the drain pipe and gain access through the unlocked window. There followed fifteen minutes of debate which covered topics as varied as hospitalisation, getting stuck, fire engines being summoned, broken drain pipes and much more besides. My quietly spoken father eventually won the argument after conjuring up a vision of Aunt Nancy returning to find her door frame shattered by four desperate lodgers. We adjourned to the back yard and watched him inch his way slowly and begrudgingly up the south face. My mother refused to look and Woodbine shares must have risen dramatically that afternoon as she puffed away distractedly around the corner of the building whilst Val and I gave a running commentary on dad's progress. Eventually he made it, uttering dark Scottish curses as he scrambled gracelessly in over the rose pink basin, carefully avoiding the tasteful, ceramic, crocheted doll which sat on the spare toilet roll. He became entangled briefly in the cords of the multicoloured venetian blinds but landed unceremoniously backside first on the bathroom floor. The eagle had landed.
ROUTINES
It was by chance that we ended up at number 11 as young families were being allocated both council houses and prefabs at that time and my parents were desperate enough to have taken either. The flimsy, hastily built, ‘temporary’ pre-fabricated units were still around when I was in my teens but were small on one level. A council house was clearly the superior option and my mother's meticulous housekeeping reflected her pride in it. It may have verged on the obsessional but perhaps that's what all kids feel about house-proud parents.
In the fifties there was a return to the convention of dads going out to work while mums stayed at home to cook, clean and care for their children. In the cooking department, mum was unquestionably unadventurous. Our weekly diet, with occasional minor excursions into more exotic fare, consisted of egg and chips on Saturday, roast on Sunday and cold roast on Monday and Tuesday if it could be stretched. Wednesday was often egg and chips again. On Thursday it was liver or chops and Friday, fish fingers. This was not totally fair but such a routine is indelibly printed in my mind. It is also true that neither my sister nor I were particularly adventurous eaters. If egg and chips did not appear on the table at lunchtime on Saturday our complaints were long and bitter. Our rivalry extended to the dinner table, of course, where we ruthlessly counted the chips, insisting on an absolutely fair division of the grub. Since comparative chip size was also of the utmost importance, mum couldn't win.
Meals were expedient rather than exotic. Apart from the fairly small budget, preparation time was limited as mum was dominated by her routines. There were constant rounds of dusting, hoovering, washing and ironing, as well as scrubbing floors, walls and kids. Dad usually arrived between six and seven from the Roots car factory at Ryton-on-Dunsmore, nearly nine miles away.
Mum did not pass her driving test until I was much older and at that time was limited to riding her ‘sit-up-and-beg’ black iron bike. We were a mile from the nearest shops and it could be purgatory to be tied up in a duffle coat (two sizes too big because it had been my sister's) and wedged into the child seat. The pleasure or pain depended upon the weather. If the wind was cold, I would resist all attempts to be loaded onto the unsteady machine. If I was really determined, two sets of hands were required to lock me into position, one to hold the bike and the other to force me into place. If the weather was good though there was nothing quite so exhilarating as whistling along to town behind my mother's swaying frame. I watched the road rushing below me and clung on tighter as a car or lorry sped past close enough to touch. I'm sure that in the end my black Woolworth's plimsolls, dangling like slugs on the end of my lanky legs, started scraping the concrete of the road and my mum decided she could no longer wheeze her way up Princess Drive with me. Like Quasimodo's hump, I was an unwelcome addition. I unbalanced her efforts to stay upright as she struggled to cope with a loaded shopping bag on each wrist.
Considering the daily problems she faced, it is not surprising that my mother became an addict. An addict over and above her smoking that is. She went through phases that defied explanation. It was as though she were continuously going through the first stages of pregnancy without the nausea. Salted peanuts, for instance, went on for a very long time. They were bought by the pound from Woolies, decanted into a polythene bag and kept in the kitchen. She would avoid getting her fingers oily or salty by keeping a spoon in the bag and shovelling a mouthful in as she dried the dishes or sat on the Debonaire spin dryer to prevent it gyrating round the kitchen. Another time it was sugar encrusted pear drops or clear mints. These treasures were a sore temptation throughout my childhood and gradually I learnt the art of pilfering.
My mother had an eye for the smallest detail and could tell if a vase, ornament, chair or paper had been moved anywhere in the house, apart from our bedrooms. I thought she even memorised the position of the peanuts in the bag as my first attempts at larceny were noticed immediately.
" Have you been at my peanuts?"
"No."
"Yes, you have. I can tell!"
I never knew whether mum could tell but my face, crimson with embarrassment, did. I eventually discovered that the key to detection lay in the position of the spoon. Once I had established this I was free to plunder the booty, provided I could remember which side of the bag the spoon had been laid.
In my infancy dad drifted in and out of family life depending on the pressure of work. He left before we were awake in the mornings and often arrived home after we had gone to bed. He also worked privately at weekends, to my mother's annoyance, never charged the going rate for the job and was the only poor plumber I knew. No wonder he was in such demand.
THE SWIMMING LESSONS
When he was around dad often set me physical challenges. Later, my impression was that he thought I wasn't tough enough for a boy and these tasks were designed to remedy this. My inclination to easy tears annoyed him. He was forever urging me to climb higher, run faster, push harder.
One of these 'Let’s put hairs on his chest' activities was a course of swimming lessons at the municipal baths. The water was twenty degrees below air temperature and, there was a drop of least a metre into the pool. To a five-year-old this was the equivalent of a leap from a Mexican cliff. The water was cloudy and uninviting and the building echoed with the cries and yells of other unfortunates.
Dad and I would cram into a cubicle designed for one very thin person. We would bang into each other's bodies trying to change at the same time. Why we didn't take it in turns I can't recall. Shivering with cold and dread, my hands curled under my chin in arthritic prayer, I was forced into woollen bathing trunks that became so heavy with the weight of water there was a danger they would drag themselves off as I climbed out of the pool. I was thrust into the arms of a brutish woman, seventeen stone, baggy green cardigan, a whistle slung around her many necks and hair pulled back so tightly it gave her face a permanent sneer. As I turned to make the great leap into the unknown I could feel the hairs growing on my chest.
These lessons were not run on soft principles of encouragement and praise. No, this was the real world. I was tied to the end of a rope and hauled up and down the lane, water rushing into my mouth and out of my nose as I waved my skinny arms frantically in the desperate but vain hope of remaining topside. My trunks occasionally won the battle and pulled me slowly under. I ran along the bottom of the pool as I was hauled along unmercifully like some demented cartoon character believing that this was the end. I would surface spluttering and choking feeling the tight rope around my middle growing tighter with every length. I would hang on panting and spluttering until the lesson finished and we once more wrestled ourselves back into our clothes. I was no nearer swimming successfully by the end of the lesson than I had been at the start and I looked ruefully at my father wondering what next instrument of endurance he was going to inflict me with next.
LIKE A STARTLED SHEEP
I was not proud and gave up easily at anything involving physical exertion. Mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, getting out of bed were all often more than my body could stand. On the one occasion that I did pull out all the stops, however, near disaster ensued. We had travelled in our grey Morris Minor on an endless journey to some remote reservoir in the foothills of Wales. My propensity for projectile vomiting when on the move had often prevented us making many such long trips. My parents had convinced me, however, that sitting on newspapers was an infallible preventative and they must have been convincing for I arrived at our destination without embarrassment.
It was a glorious spot and the weather was hot and dry. To get to the reservoir at the very top of the hill we had to clamber up a steep path of a stream, a tedious slog. My mother and sister forwent this challenge and stayed to sleep in the shade of a tree whilst dad and I set off, intending to walk along the wall of the dam. Half way up we found a dead, decomposing sheep lying across the crystal clear stream that we had been drinking from just fifty feet below. My father had earlier assured me that that there was no cleaner water anywhere in the country and we had drunk our fill, parched from the hot climb. I caught the look of horror on his face for an instant but he avoided my stare and we pressed on, referring only to the likely cause of death of the animal.
I felt a strong desire to return home for a thorough medical check-up but we carried on to the summit. The view was breath-taking and we marvelled at the strength of the structure holding back billions of gallons of (hopefully sheep free) water. The bouncing bomb and the merits of being a back gunner in a Lancaster bomber were the main topics of conversation, the latter having been my father's ambition during the war. We skimmed stones and threw grass darts at each other until it was time to return to the others. We decided on a different route back across open country and down a long winding path to the small cliff that ran by the side of the road. As usual a challenge was set. 'Last one down's a sissy.'
Despite his bad back and middle age dad set off at a cracking pace, taking the long hair pin bends in his stride. He had been an excellent footballer and athlete in his youth and I knew I was on to a loser. My only hope of victory lay on another course. I decided to cheat and take the short cut directly down the steeper, open land, in a straight line. I felt confident of victory.
An upbringing in the Borough of Royal Leamington Spa had not offered me much in the way of mountaineering experience and it wasn't until I was some way down that I realised I was out of control. My feet were hitting the ground harder and harder as momentum built up. I was accelerating alarmingly and my legs seemed no longer to connect with my brain. The ground rushed past as I thudded down the side of the hill crossing the path my father had taken at various intervals. Since it was impossible to stop, without serious injury, I had to keep my balance. In the distance, behind me, I could hear my father's voice shouting words of encouragement or disapproval. Air punched fiercely out of my lungs with each step and I gasped to take in more. I was dizzy with lack of oxygen and looked up to see the land vanishing ahead as the small, sloping cliff edge rushed towards me.
There was nothing I could do. I took off. Below were large boulders that met my knees and hands with a crack that seemed to echo through the valley. Luckily, the cliff was only about ten feet high at this point. If I had fallen further up I don’t think I would have survived. My father reached me and, relieved that I was still breathing, carried me back to the picnic spot. My knees, arms and head were badly bruised but miraculously nothing was broken.
I lay in bed that night, aching and uncomfortable, re-living the day’s events. I envisaged a sheep, startled by a fox, taking off down the mountain at great speed. Its legs kept going, faster and faster, until it plunged over a precipice and crashed lifeless into a stream.
LIFTING THE LACE
I never really knew either of my grandfathers. Granddad Locke died when I was about two and I never met my father’s father, who had died before I was born. Nan, my mother's mother, lived about two miles away in Brook Street. Her husband had been a butcher in Hatton and my earliest memories of her are set in Chandos House, a large Victorian dwelling that always seemed due for demolition. It smelt damp and old but was full of mystery and boasted a cellar and an attic. Chickens were kept in the high walled yard and the kitchen still functioned around a low stone sink. The water was drawn by pumping a handle.
The cellar was cold and, despite a solitary bulb, dark corners whispered danger as spiders scuttled across the flaking whitewashed walls. Heaps of coal were piled at the bottom of the steps and exploring further involved clambering over them. Unfortunately there was no way a highly scrubbed grandchild could get past this barrier without covering himself in tell tale signs of coal dust.
Nan was stone deaf but always insisted on using her National Health hearing aid. This cumbersome, pink plastic unit, clamped to her cardigan, would often let out a high pitched whistle which sent her dog scampering from the room. We often arrived to find the animal howling, her hearing aid screeching, the hens squawking and fluttering and Nan herself dozing contentedly in her chair.
Val and I only stayed overnight once at Nan's and it was a disaster. Trouble was inevitable since neither of us had ever shared a bedroom before, let alone a bed. Mum and dad had gone for a rare night out together and we resented being left out. We demanded endless drinks of water, made constant visits to the toilet and I complained loud and long that, 'She touched me!' or Val bemoaned that I kept taking all the blankets!. Each time we needed Nan we had to climb down two flights of stairs to attract her attention. The final straw came when a bee invaded our bedroom, prompting us both to head downstairs again to the living room. I can remember being flicked very hard across the head with Nan's thimble as she growled at us and we were sent scuttling back to the relative safety of the bedroom.
We were slow on the uptake but eventually realised that we could make as much noise as we liked, without being heard. We needed to find a way of eliminating the bee problem. An old, black, wooden travelling trunk stood near the banisters. To me it was Long John Silver's treasure chest and could well contain the weapon needed to defeat our foe. My sister took some persuading that it would be O.K. to have a look inside. She always held back on occasions like this so that she could argue later that she had warned me against it.
The chest was not locked and the large brass clasps clicked apart easily. As I lifted the lid, an aroma of moth balls and lavender permeated the landing. Beneath some lace wrapped in brown paper we came across the head of a dead fox. We gasped and recoiled at the sight of its beady eyes staring up at us. Chalky white teeth seemed to smile, mockingly. Tentatively, I touched its dry black nose and then pulled the head out carefully from between rustling lace parcels. The fox had a luxuriant bushy tail and Val demonstrated how to wear it, clipping its mouth into position on its leg.
Delving further into the chest, I discovered a large Union Jack rolled around a magnificent pole that fitted together in two pieces. The head of the pole was turned to a point and I decided that this was the weapon I had been searching for. We returned to the bedroom and after slotting the two lengths together, I spent some time chasing and stabbing at a now demented bee. As I attacked back and forth across the bedroom, the flag billowed majestically in support behind. My sister, meanwhile, was bouncing on the bed, lashing out at the insect with the fox as it passed. Suddenly, the fox’s head connected with the wall above the bed and there was a dry, cracking sound. In the half light we couldn't be sure whether the wall had been damaged or the skull of the fox now lay shattered in its skin. As we couldn’t feel any damage to the skull we continued the hunt until the invader finally escaped the room and our torment.
We returned the items to the chest and replaced the lace parcels on top. Hearing movement below, we rushed back to bed and simulated sleep. Mum and Dad had returned. They climbed the stairs to see if we were all right but Nan had spotted a detail out of place. The brass clasps on the trunk had not been pushed home. We heard murmurings outside the door, a lid opening, the rustle of paper. The murmurings grew louder.
Seconds later, all three adults erupted into our room. Rapidly establishing that we were feigning sleep they conducted a thorough investigation into the night’s events. Had we killed the bee there would have been evidence to support our innocent intentions. What we hadn't spotted in the gloom of our room was that the fox's proud smile was marred by a set of broken teeth and that its nose was more than a touch off centre. With the light turned on it was also not difficult to spot at least a dozen puncture holes in the ceiling plaster where the flag had missed its mark. It is probably wise to draw a veil over the details of what was said and done that night. I just remember how cold the back seat of the car felt through my thin pyjamas and how I first heard the word 'bloody' from my incensed parents.
Nan used to visit us every Christmas and ritually fell asleep on the settee after lunch, mouth open and teeth dropping loose, allowing us to take amusing snaps of her with our instamatic cameras. I never worked out why they were called ‘instamatic’ as the photos took as long to develop as those from any other type of camera. I suppose when you pressed the button they took pictures instantly but surely all cameras did that? Many families across the country must have a series of photographs of their aged relatives asleep, party hat on head and an empty brandy glass by their side.
Nan's house was eventually demolished but she stayed in Brook Street, moving into one of the new two storey block of flats at the bottom of the road. As a young teenager I visited her every Saturday morning to do odd jobs and she slipped me a ten bob note in return, more to thank me for coming to see her probably than for the effort of going shopping or sweeping her veranda. Nan eventually suffered from dementia and was admitted to Hatton psychiatric hospital, in the same village as her husband had kept his butcher's shop. I didn't visit her. Towards the end she was apparently reliving her own childhood, asking for her father or old friends, sorting through her own chest of memories. I remember my Mum sobbing when she came back from a visit as Nan hadn't recognise her.
Memories of my Scottish grandmother are few but very clear. She was the white haired, softly spoken, rounded lady who always wore a white pinafore. On our rare visits to her in West Preston Street we would fall asleep to the sound of the pendulum on the postman's clock hanging high on the kitchen wall. Granny Berry could be seen through the crack of our open bedroom door rocking gently in her bootie slippers before climbing into her own bed in an alcove in the kitchen wall. She would remove her dressing gown and heave herself in before drawing the heavy curtain across. It was very cosy as the kitchen was the warmest room in the house.
The tenement was built in a quadrangle and we would be woken early by the sounds of other residents talking and moving along the common walkways, hung with washing. The sun found it difficult to penetrate the surrounding buildings and it wasn't until later in the morning that the gloom was broken. The darkness in our bedroom was compounded by distinctive roller blinds made from heavy brown paper. They were spring loaded and cut sharply into your fingers if they were released too quickly.
We took a long time getting dressed and washed, using any delaying tactics to postpone the inevitable breakfast of salted porridge. This was not porridge from a packet but well boiled bran and milk. I felt it also contained the blood of the dead and gasses from the swamps of hell. It arrived in a steaming cauldron of immense proportions. The table sighed as it was lowered onto its straining surface and the liquid continued to plop and gurgle like some primeval swamp long after it had left the stove. Great dollops of the stuff were ladled into our bowls. An unseen hand seemed to be pressing heavily down on it as it crawled its way from the ladle to the bowl. At home Scott's porridge oats were liberally decorated with sugar or treacle but Granny Berry would, 'Hear o' no such thing.' Salt was the only permitted addition.
We used to visit the seaside at Portobello, just a few miles down the road and I can remember stumbling and falling into the wet sand once with my mouth open. The grit scratched my teeth and tore the soft underside of my tongue. It reminded me of the taste and texture of Granny Berry's porridge.
JOHN BOWLER
I hated going away on any visit or holiday. The area around Edmondscote Road was a child's paradise. The fields across the garden, the river beyond the fields, the railway lines, the woods on the far side of the river and Victoria Park across Princes Drive were all playgrounds for the imagination.
John Bowler was my first best friend. With him I discovered the delights of scrumping, climbing, rafting and exploring. John was smaller than me (although this was true of most lads my age) and lived in the house directly opposite. We often communicated with torches and once rigged up tin can telephones across the road. The weight of the string was so heavy though that often when we pulled it tight it snapped. We were finally thwarted when Mr. Lumbley's furniture van turned the corner and ripped the device violently out of our hands. The cans could be heard bumping and scraping down the road. John and I hid behind our respective curtains and watched in glee and some trepidation as the mystified driver pulled over, thinking his engine had fallen apart.
We often made forays down to the river although neither of us could swim. It is unlikely that my prowess at walking along the bottom of a swimming pool with a rope round my waist would have served me well had I fallen into the waterfall with its treacherous eddies and roaring currents. An earthen bank ran fifteen feet above the river beside the large concrete steps that formed the waterfall and growing from it was an ancient willow whose branches were often draped with old hessian ropes. You could run down the bank, grab the rope and swing out over the river fifteen feet below. We never established who tied these ropes to the tree and never saw anyone else using them. We scared ourselves once discussing this, concluding that whoever had put them there had used them once or twice and then fell off, sucked into the turbulent foam. We imagined the decaying bodies of teenage boys rolling around in the mud and slime below but it never occurred to us to stop using the ropes ourselves.
Our stupidity reached its zenith one day when my father came home from the thrift shop with a bundle under his arm. It was an old army parachute that had been used for dropping crates and other small items. John and I would often leap from the shed roof on to the soft lawn below but this was much more exciting. As we stood on the roof of the shed one of us would hold the chute open while the other gripped the webbing straps and jumped. It was a frustrating sensation as the tug of resistance from the canopy bit just as our feet hit the lawn. Amused by our antics, dad walked off indoors.
On the far side of the muddy pools and building rubble beneath the bridge on our side of the river was a building site which was to become the new Leamington Technical College; five or six stories of glass and concrete. John and I planned carefully. We would practise all day Saturday and on Sunday, when there were no workmen around, parachute off the building.
It was astonishingly easy to get on to the site as there was no fencing or guard dogs. With the chute packed securely in a canvas bag we made our way towards the half- finished building, intending to get as high as we could and leap off. In retrospect we could easily have become entangled in the scaffolding protruding from the front of the building or plummeted to our deaths if the chute had failed to open. We envisaged that we would drift gracefully down and across the river, landing on the opposite bank in Victoria Park. The possibility of landing in the middle of the river and being sucked down in a confusion of silk and strings, rolling over the waterfall and joining the rolling bodies of the rope swingers was never considered.
We were two stories up before we were spotted. There was a shout from below and a watchman or workman started to yell obscenities and give chase. He was obviously a skilled climber and was already on the floor below us before we started running along the loose planks that criss-crossed the scaffolding. It was a game of cat and mouse. He knew that if he climbed up one end of the building we would run to the other and get down.
Our hearts were pounding but escape seemed possible if we kept our heads. Our pursuer had worked out a plan to trap us though. He had located a loose scaffolding pole and started to knock out the planks on our level. We looked at each other in dismay as one by one the planks in front of us crashed to the floor below, narrowly missing the watchman. It was a good idea and would have worked but he decided he had done enough and ran to the far end to climb the ladder. Without hesitation we shimmied our way along the horizontal pipes, gripping the flaky iron with sweating palms. We reached the ladder before our adversary, made it to the gap and slid down quickly, burning our hands to slow our descent. We had gained valuable seconds but it wasn't enough. As we raced across the waste land towards the bridge we could hear the thud of his heavy boots dropping to the ground. The parachute was slowing me down and, much as I hated to do it, I dropped the pack as we ran for cover under the bridge, through the muddy pools, past the waterfall and into familiar hideout territory.
We had not been followed. The watchman was evidently content to have seen us off the site or maybe the canvas pack was too tempting to leave for someone else. We would never know. He probably saved one of us from an early grave - in the froth beneath the rotten willow where no rope now hangs.
PET CEMETERY
John and I both owned dogs and shared a love of animals. I had three dogs in the course of my childhood: Darkie, Buster and Sally. I only remember John owning one. It was a small wiry animal with black hair hanging in a fringe across its muzzle. It appeared to have no eyes and was called Boots after the cartoon dog in the Perishers, a cartoon series in the Daily Mirror. Boots escaped from kennels once while the Bowlers were away on holiday and it took nearly a month to recapture him. He was sighted living wild in the fields on the outskirts of town. John took the romantic view that Boots would eventually find his own way home. Unfortunately it was not the Disney ending John had envisaged as he was eventually captured by a farmer and returned ignominiously to the kennels in a box before he could complete his mission.
My mother was never keen on animals as they represented extra work, dirt, responsibility and cost but to her great credit we were never long without a mongrel of some description. Darkie was our first dog and definitely a mistake. It was probably because we were such amateur dog owners that we turned him into the dog equivalant of a paranoid schizophrenic. He demanded attention day and night, refused to obey commands, ate voraciously and destroyed any inanimate object that did not threaten to break his teeth. One Sunday my mother returned to the kitchen in time to see him trotting happily down the garden path with the Sunday roast in his mouth. She had left it resting on the pull down oven door to prevent it burning while she answered the phone. Shouting furiously she leapt after the dog and cornered it by the fence. How Darkie had managed to carry the meat that far without scalding his mouth is hard to understand because as my mother tugged at it she burnt her hand, letting out another yell. By this time the neighbours had gone quiet and were tuning in to events in the Berry back yard. Two determined adversaries faced it out at the O.K. corral.
Darkie growled malevolently. My mother glowered and threatened. Darkie tugged and twisted. My mother twisted and tugged. Finally, using her apron to grasp the joint firmly and with futile kicks of her slippered feet , she managed to dislodge the dinner from Darkie's mouth. We then watched horrified as she washed the joint under the hot tap. We were not the richest of families and there was no way we were going to go without our Sunday leg of lamb. My parents bravely ate their lunch while my sister and I poked tentatively at it, remembering how often we had seen our pet lick its rear end.
Darkie was not averse to attacking anyone who showed fear and in that respect was a good watch dog. We had little that was worth stealing but this hardly affected his vigilance. John was pretty wary of my black avenger and was often forced to beat a retreat if the dog spotted him. One sunny afternoon I was exercising my hamster on the front lawn while Darkie foraged in the bushes. John turned the corner into the road and spotted me lying on the lawn. He started to make his way towards me but before I could warn him Darkie had leapt out from the cover of the hedge and charged. John was cut off from his own house so he dashed for the safety of our passageway. We were both amused by the situation as we could see that he would make it easily. John went thundering past me en route to salvation but fatally one of his black Woolworth's plimsolls landed on Hammy, who let out an unearthly screech. The wounded rodent dashed lobsidedly towards the gate that John had slammed shut, scrabbled underneath and made for his cage under the lean to by the kitchen door. He could have been the first homing hamster in history.
This was forever after known as "Hammy's last run" because by the next morning he was dead. I blamed John. John blamed Darkie. Dad blamed me. I buried him in the garden under a lollipop stick cross where he joined a growing number of unfortunate animals. There was Terry the terrapin who remained sadly frozen half in and half out of the water in his aluminium bucket when the frost came. Tommy the tortoise didn't really need to be buried because all that remained when I found him was his shell. He had been consumed by ants. There were two goldfish that my sister and I had smuggled into the house and kept on her window sill. They lasted less than a day due to the unusually hot sun that broiled them in their bowl. 11 Edmondscote Road was a bit of a slaughterhouse for the unfortunate reptiles, amphibians and rodents that were invited to stay.
Darkie was eventually returned to the P.D.S.A., classified as ‘an animal out of control.’ The final straw came when he took up gardening. Mr. Widkins had spent the weekend digging new beds around his front lawn, putting in fertiliser and planting privet hedge plants. Last thing at night Darkie dug up the entire set of beds and by morning all the baby plants had shrivelled and withered. I was blamed for letting him out and had to spend hours re-bedding privets. I managed to save them but not, unfortunately, Darkie.