Notes on 'Growing up in Heswall'

Growing up in Heswall.




What is often remembered of childhood are the smells and sounds, the sights originally viewed through the great lens of newness that accompanies that passage of time.

We might remember the warmth and faint musk of a privet hedge that we brushed against in the beige Barathea coats with chocolate-brown velvet buttons we wore, helped on by our mother, over arms and shoulders. Or else the sound of wrought-iron gate latches at shoulder height and the white curl of the gates themselves, for example as we were ushered into the drive of a neighbour's home.

We might recall the idea of being resigned to quiet play, half listening to the 'visit talk' unravel for what could end up being two hours or more. There would be the arrival of Iced Sports biscuits or Battenburg on a tea tray with an aluminium pot of narrow spout and cups and saucers that shook as they were brought through from the kitchen for our sakes. There would be fidgetting at the seemingly large, shiny-stockinged and dependable knees of our Mum. We would notice our own shoes, or Maud's shoes, or else the particular swirls of Maud's carpet. Other things at foot level would be noticed too.
Then there was the crazy paving or the gatepost stones pebbledashed like great sugar loaves.

There were the evenings too, when, leaning out of the top bedroom window, the acrobatic arching of swifts with their magical screams would entertain us; dear birds we dared, hoped would come closer, closer to our window ledges that they might alight, that we might brush them, touch their trembling, electric wings as they went swooping and swooning past the H-shaped TV aerial. Dear birds that we envied as they carried on screaming and arching in the balmy air whilst we must be closed down for the night behind curtains because it 'was bedtime.'
These were birds whose antics were yet mixed up with our having watched Dad play for Heswall C.C. on Whitfield Common that same evening and  with the heat trapped from a day's-worth of sun, musty behind those blue velvet curtains, warmth that made the wool carpet smell ropey.



There were a thousand things recalled about school too. The hot-cold oozing of grazes to gravel-pitted knees following a fall in the playground. (these to be worn as a badge of honour as indicated by the crimson blood and attendant scabbing that must be preserved at all costs). The refusal of the boys to let you into their makeshift game of cricket because 'girl's can't play.'The gritty taste of the milk in its half-pint glass bottles , brought out into the school corridors in aluminium crates, along with orange juice as an alternative. The glazed brown bricks of the corridors, the pastel green and the coat pegs. Rows of plimsoll bags, some with stitched monogrammed names.The doors with their frosted glass quarter-lights. The assembly hall, parqueted in beechwood flooring upon which we squatted, cross-legged or with our knees tucked up, examining the grazes and the landscape of our legs, fiddling with socks, tucking frocks into knickers or mouthing the words to hymns whenever the eyes of teachers sidelining the assembly hall would seem to rest upon us onerously.
At dinner hour, the trestle tables that lined both sides of the hall were put out, along with the forms that we slid along, ready for pale pink roast beef slices,cabbage, soapy roast potatoes and diced carrots, stewed apple and custard or spotted dick .The dinners were dispensed from aluminium troughs with aluminium ladles. The roast potatoes were always a huge favourite and those who pleaded with the dinner ladies would be offered more if they were lucky. Rhubarb crumble, with its undercooked toppings, generously sugared, was also a big hit with us kids.The mash usually contained grit of some kind.

The incidence of kids being sick on the parquet floor at morning assembly, before or after 'Music and Movement' was one of the mysteries of school life that is not forgotten. Such incidences were always followed by a parting of the paticular line of schoolchildren at the site of the occurence. Then there came our school janitor, Mr. Leadbetter, an old man (or so we thought)with slicked , back faded ginger hair, a wrinkled and reddish face and a pair of dark blue denim overalls. Mr. Leadbetter wore a resigned, mute expression. He would bring a yardbrush and a pail of sand into the hall and sprinkle the sand over the patch of vomit before sweeping it up with a shovel. The children who were wise avoided sitting there for asssembly the following morning although sometimes it could not be avoided.
The hymn sheets that lined the hall were larger than they needed to have been so that all could read from them. 'Let us sing Hymn number 202, 'When I survey the wondrous cross', announced from the stage was accompanied by tiny groans and whispering as the huge sheets, made of something resembling chip paper were turned over by a teacher stationed there for the purpose. Windows that opened outwards on hinges or else tall sash windows would be opened with long window poles with their brass hooks when it was 'stuffy' and the world outside might as well not have been there when teaching was in progress.

There are the endless sublime memories of home life, too, such as the smell of fag-end tobacco in soapy water and a mysterious swoosh as our Dad relished the freedom of the bathtub.

Or the application by Mum of the gas poker with its blue flame and metallic smell to the dankness of the waiting coal hearth at 36,Grange Mount, the semi-detached house that was our first home, pebbledashed over redbrickwork. How Mum would lean down to the hearth with her dark hair in a French Roll, her lovely brown eyes intent, intelligent, guarding the fire, pushing in the newspaper whorls, chucking the coals forward in their scuttle with a measured dexterity, clenching her teeth lightly as an unconscious aid to concentration.

Our Grange Mount, our house was in Heswall. The town you fancied would some day be 'on the map' (if you had anything to do with it, that was). Our child's landscape was mapped out in Heswall according to the Sunday chore of collecting the papers, which necessitated running down May Road to the paper shop. Playing out and Primary School were other landscapes, hallowed places.

There were outer limits. Poll Hill, for example with its wildness and the mystery of gorse bushes that popped in the evening's summer heat, the unchartered sandy pathways threading through them to the far side, to forbidden territory, to the edge of something adult.

Or Telegraph Road as far as the library and the magnificent Castle Park whose manicured borders and flower beds with their scarlet Begonias, Snow-in-Summer and Aubretia gave off that Municipal smell. In the park, all was sandstone edged, all was close-cropped, springy lawn. Around the edges of the manicured borders, separating the park from Telegraph Road and Sandy Lane were the sighing beeches, some of which were Copper. Their masts crunched under the feet and the dust arose from swept paths as we children ran around the place. Here, in the centre of those springy lawns were shallow ornamental ponds lined with dead leaves and often dried-up. These had their own mystery and had to be run around in their figure-of-eightness. In the ponds, which seemed large at the time in a kind of continental way, you hoped to find tadpoles during the late Spring. In the caked mud of the summer months, when there had been no rain for the past ten days or so, these ornamental ponds and their caked mud revealed themselves in a new way but lost none of their strange charm.There was the feeling that one might find some halfpennies in the foreignness of the mud, might find something.

The council offices overshadowing the park were grand and had a stillness about them, though doubtless something went on in their cloistered offices. The deep summer shadows of their sandstone and pebble-dashed walls were thrown over Castle Park. We would run around that empire of park in our glazed cotton summer frocks, the ones that Mum had made for us, cut out of shapes pinned to tissue paper with its instructions, the selvedge cut with her special pinking shears grinding against the kitchen table, the frayings left in the wake of those cuts.

The Kitchen table.

This beautiful table, oval, of dark wood with its four straight-backed chairs, they having upholstered seats full of horsehair that used occasionally to poke out in periods of examination during deep thought served us all throughout our lives, the entire lives of our family and much of the lives of our Mum and Dad. It is with us still, homed at my sister's flat where it continues to creak when sat at, continues to shine and throw its sanity and sobriety, its longevity, its ingenuity at us for our enjoyment. We can still feel and rejoice in the exquisite craftsmanship by which the drop leaves and hinges swing back and forth and the gates dovetail into their housings.

This was the table that was used to rub pencilled in homework out whilst it creaked underneath our Physics notebooks or General Note Books.This was the table whose barleytwist legs and carpented struts were rubbed and itched by the feet of our selves in the act of concentration on homework, frustration at the thorny questions. This was the table under which the two Siamese cats owned in succession used to hide when in high dudgeon or to escape a drubbing for not having eaten their Whiskas, or else for dropping a dead shrew on the kitchen doorstep.The cats knew it was not easy for us to prise them out from between those struts and legs, although we always tried.

This was the table around which all meals were had, around which all of our Christmases and Boxing Days swirled. On which, later, our father sat us for the sake of the 'production line.' A table which, when not in use for taking primary school lunch breaks might have been polished afresh by Mum and a vase with flowers stood upon one of its raffia mats (mats we had made at school). The flowers would be studied and painted by Mum's loose, water-filled brushes, brought to fine tips with her agility over the paper and by her sucking them lightly.

The Production Line.

We never tired of taking the small notices from a freshly printed batch, folding them in half- while she held the pins between her teeth, still talking to us, still answering our questions.

May Road (unadopted) was a kind of dried-up, sandy riverbed with, at the far end as a destination, the paper shop.

The early evening with those swifts screaming and wobbling past the eaves were about the poll of Grange Mount itself, the summit at the top of our world where boys dropped the almost forbidden plastic bombs, bought from the tuck shop, whose greeny caps exploded, leaving tiny puffs of cordite and a small, faint black mark where the bomb had detonated itself with a kind of miniature explosion. All was gravel and grey, sock-high view.

Wooden plank and rope used to burn your palms when the home-made cart your brother had made ran away with you, you steering it wildly into the kerb to stop it going all the way down, stop it picking up momentum on the way to another outer boundary, Pensby Road.

Pensby Road was busy, was where the adult world came and went on its way to work (or wherever.)

The names of shops and businesses there were resolutely themselves to our childish perception, so that 'Rose Brae Nurseries' were just that, the name having a sing-song quality and being as dependable as the potatoes that were sold inside the dark, musty interior of the store.

The produce arrived, it was presumed, from the nurseries behind the store in a never-ending supply. The savoy cabbages were lined along their wooden shelves and pulpits and the yawning potato bins were always semi-filled with their earthy delights. The steel potato scuttle was never idle for long. Cloth bags, shopping trolleys and leather sac-style bags were filled from the rumbling hoppers with a good weight of spuds. Eagerly, the potato scuttles poured the things amidst clouds of dust. Us twins were sent to Rose Brae Nurseries for things, rhubarb, cabbage, potatoes mainly.

There was a particular excitement about being asked to go to Rose Brae Nurseries, as there was something untoward, perhaps criminal going on in the upstairs landing of the shop.

There was Mrs.Kingdom, next door but one who smelled of Kit-E-Kat and had an unknown number of cats( scores were suspected) and always a flowered apron for some purpose, though surely not for cleaning as the doorway of her house was dark, rank and smelled of Kit-E-Kat too. Mrs.Kingdom had whiskers, practically a beard. You knew that you were not supposed to laugh at her rankness or whiskers, but you did anyway.

Then there was Hilda next door, who was either in or out near her back door, one that was mainly in the shade unless she came up to the all-important sandstone wall that divided 36, Grange Mount from her house, 34.
Hilda had empty stone planters that lived in the shade cast by the back of her house over her tiny yard. Most importantly, she had one well-fed tabby with clear, dramatic markings and a pristine-white chest. Hilda's tom cat was enormously heavy. We would take turns trying to pick him up when we dared. He, with his clear-glass eyes that would show the whites and his prolapsed gut. Picking him up would cause his claws to emerge from paws protruding from the ends of ramrod straight legs in a protesting manner. Once picked up, the claws would retract into his down-soft paws. Invariably, he would wriggle out of our child's expectancies. Kitty had a low moaning voice and had learned to sit on Hilda's window-ledge and rap the brass door-knocker with one paw. This meant that he touched the knocker with one gingerly extended paw and that Hilda probably knew he was outside waiting to be let in. She, with her whispy, ginger hair and square-framed glasses and fine hairs protruding from a well-formed chin used to wipe her hands on her pinny and laugh breathlessly, asthmatically, nodding towards Kitty and his genius for knocking on the door. She saw how it amused us.