On one occasion, my father hung his jacket over the hedge before starting and after a while, his friend asked him with complete seriousness, if his jacket had any sleeves on it before they started trimming.  One summer day a female relative visited him dressed in a flowery dress and wearing thin, dainty, pretty net gloves and he asked her, with absolute seriousness if, before she took her gloves off, she would mind pulling up a few thistles for him.  His high spirits and good humour never left him, and yet, he, like my father had two sons and a daughter, who died at the age of nine, so he too experienced a great personal tragedy.  He was one of the many wonderful characters that I had the privilege of knowing.

One of our pleasures was to walk to Barnetby to see the "pictures" in St Barnabas hall, which was set up as a cinema.  We sat on extremely hard, uncomfortable wooden benches, and always seemed to listen to the Blue Danube before the film started.  It was probably the only record they had.  The films were black and white and at least once in every film, the lights went on for the projectionist to see to change the reels.  We always went back for more.

After the war, for a certain time, a dilapidated, clapped out, dirty blue van arrived in the village every Monday evening.  We didn’t need to be told that it was there as you could smell it from miles away, but we awaited its arrival with great excitement as it delivered our weekly supply of fish and chips.  We could only afford the greasy chips, which we made palatable by floating them in vinegar.  We kept pouring the vinegar until it dripped off the ends of our elbows.  Today, neither the van nor the chips would be allowed out onto a public road.

Melton Ross people were presumably like others in Britain, and did not welcome change. When we were told that Americans used tea-bags, we openly sneered at them and thought, what do they know about making tea.  We all used the 'chopping' type of garden hoe, and when the 'push-pull' hoe, which we called a Dutch hoe was introduced we said how ridiculous it was and that it would never catch on.

Almost all houses had outside lavatories and when more modern houses were built with lavatories upstairs, we said how disgusting and ridiculous that was. "If it is wet outside and your boots are covered in mud, you don't want to be trailing all that muck upstairs, do you," we all said.  All bicycles were black, but I built mine out of bits and pieces of many other bicycles which were lots of different shades of black and rust.  Being proud of my new creation I decided to paint it, but the only paint that I could find was bright pea green.  This caused a sensation and a lot of leg pulling, but it did not stop me being delighted with it, even though I never managed to find any brakes to go with the rest of it.   I was probably the first person in the village to wear a duffle coat, which was just coming into fashion.  No one had seen anyone, apart from seafarers, wearing a coat like that, with a hood on it and no buttons. One man said that the only other person to wear anything like it was Father Christmas.

We knew the lane that I mentioned earlier as Benny Goose's lane.  I never knew who Benny Goose was but there was a very old, spooky, tumbledown house in the lane with a well outside the back door, which we believed was haunted (the house not the well). (Or the back door either).  If we really had to go down that lane, we would go as fast as our little legs would carry us so that the ghost of Benny would not catch us.  There are a few trees and a large fishing pond between the top of Barnetby Hill and Catta Lane,  This area was known as Specky Webb.  Again, I wonder who he was.  The road between Green Lane and Barnetby had a few old houses, which were collectively known as Gibbons's Hovel. I have no idea who Gibbons might have been.

It must have been at the end of the war or just after, when I went to a house with three children, about my age, living in it.  To my amazement, the parents produced three bananas and gave one to each child to eat.  I had never seen a banana in my life before and had to watch as they greedily scoffed the bananas and did not even give me a smell or a lick of them.  They gave me an empty banana skin to take home to show my family, who had to be convinced that I had not tasted the banana.  That was probably the worst case of cruelty and selfishness that I have ever experienced.  It was like giving sweets to every child in a room except one. I have had a feeling of complete loathing for the parents of that family ever since.  Their cruelty was deliberate.

In the village, there was a large wooden building, which in any other village was called the village hall. We called it the Reading Room, or simply "The Hut." It is still there today but is, I imagine, much more modern now.  The men used it for recreation, where they could play billiards, snooker, darts, dominoes and cards or simply meet friends.  You could also buy soft drinks and crisps.  There was a local games league, in which the different villages would take each other on in competition at the various games.  My brother and his friend won the dominoes cup to the amazement of everyone, as they were both about twelve years old and in competition with much older men.  Experienced, older people tried to figure out their tactics but failed completely for the very simple reason that they didn't have any tactics. They simply matched up the spots and munched their crisps.  My brother often won prizes at whist drives as well.  One of his treasured prizes was a pink rose bowl with a statue of a lady on it, but neither of us knows what happened to it. [Continued]