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| We would often finish
up drunk, and there was a good fish and chip shop, which rounded the
night off perfectly. One night I drove from Laceby to Grimsby
with eleven people in my car. I was the driver and I had a
young woman sitting on my knee all the way to Grimsby. We would keep ourselves occupied all night long and usually arrive home in time for breakfast on Sunday and Monday mornings. One friend arrived home very late one Monday morning and decided he could have an hour's sleep before getting up for work and crept quietly into his bedroom, but being the worse for wear made a lot of noise and woke up his father. His father shouted and asked why he was making such a noise. He replied that he was just getting up. His father said, "It’s only five o'clock you fool. Get back into bed." The same friend lived a way outside the village and rode into Melton on his bike. One freezing winter night, being slightly the worse for wear, he ran into a big pile of sugar beet and promptly went to sleep. He woke up several hours later, covered in frost and still sitting upright on his bike. Eventually I passed my driving test and we all carried on as before. A few years later Ernie said that he had some wonderful news. When we asked him what it was, he replied, "I passed my driving test this afternoon." There were some odd sayings at Melton Ross. When referring to the weather you might say, "It's cold enough for two pairs of bootlaces" or "It’s an overcoat warmer." If you threatened to kick someone, you would say, "I'm going to put six lace holes up his behind." A man could be described as so mean that he would skin a f**t for a ha'penny (half a penny). If someone seemed to be going round in circles he was described as, "like a f**t in a colander.” If a man's word could not be trusted, people said, "He'll say anything but his prayers, then he whistles." No one ever spoke strong or foul language, but some of it was definitely strongly farmyard. A young girl is supposed to have said to her mother "Can't you get Dad to stop calling it dung, it doesn't sound very nice. "Her mother replied, "It's taken me ten years to get him to call it dung." An old country joke. There were some strange nicknames, like. Spiddy, Gonger, Gegg, Norkus, Ching, Clue, Bunt, Shems, Shufty and Sniffer. I once worked on a farm with a girl
called Isobel, who looked after cattle and did general farm work for
a farmer called Billy Foster. I wrote her a poem, which went:- Billy Foster lived at what is now known as Stonecroft House, and is one of the well-known Cheshire Homes. The road leading to it was known as Foster's drive. We called the different parts of the village after the people who lived there, so the names are meaningless today as everyone has either moved on or passed on. The school had coal fires and the coalhouse was outside immediately at the back of the fireplace. There was a small door about one foot (30 cms) square in the coalhouse, which opened just above the fire in the fireplace, so if anyone put anything through the door it went onto the fire. We would ask for permission to go to the toilet and then drop conkers into the fire. After about five or ten minutes the conkers would go off like hand grenades, sending showers of fire and sparks across the classroom. Unfortunately, the teacher knew who had left the classroom earlier and the punishment was very painful. As small schoolboys we held competitions to see who could "pee" the highest up the lavatory wall. We also placed bets on what colour the "pee" would be. It would either be yellow or clear which we called "limeade" or "lemonade." I won many of those bets as I quickly realised that if you hadn’t been for a while it would be yellow, but if you had been recently it would be clear. The others didn’t seem to cotton on to that fact and wondered how I knew. We also tried to write our names in the snow. A word of endearment spoken by the older women of the village to the children was "duck". They would say something like. "Hello William duck" or "How are you Mavis duck" and "You look smart Alan duck." I once went to a house where they were expecting me and the lady came to the door and said, "Come in Donald duck." After a moment, we both collapsed with laughter. All the trains that passed through the village were steam trains and lumps of coal would fall from the trains and lie in the grass beside the track. I once found an enormous piece of coal –about the size of a television set. I couldn’t carry it so I put it in a large sack and dragged it about a mile to my home and put it in the coal shed. I was completely exhausted but happy that I was now big enough to support my family. I went into the house and told my mother that I had a surprise for her and she followed me outside. I proudly opened the door and pointed to the coal. She went mad and said "I’m not going to prison for you. You know it is a serious crime to steal coal. It will be dark in ten minutes so take it back to where it came from and make sure no one sees you." I went out alone into the blackness of a winter's night with just the coal for company muttering, "You just can’t please some people. I'll never do anything for her again." [Continued] |
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