WritersShowcase

"Come and listen to this." Peter was pressing his ear against the study wall and invited me to do the same. The study was in the loft of his house and the wall was actually the inside of the sloping roof. Behind the boards cladding the roof, we could hear a faint rustling sound, like dried leaves in the wind.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Bloody Bats nesting in the joists! A bloke from the council said I have to leave them alone. A protected species, he said."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"There’s nothing I can do at the moment," said my brother, "I’ll just have to wait until they eventually leave the nest, then get up the ladder and plug the gaps where they came in."

Peter poured another large Scotch for both of us. We called them ‘Kelly’ measures. They were very generous measures and whenever we met up, it was a tradition befitting our Celtic lineage, to partake of a wee dram of Whisky.

"Slainte." Peter raised his glass.

"Slaandjivaa." I emptied mine.

I sat on the floor with my back against the wall or should I say, the sloping roof. There was only one chair in the loft and Peter had claimed that. Well, it was his study after all. Stacks of books, papers and box files leaned against the wall beside me and amongst them, a couple of yellowing, dog-eared foolscap notepads caught my eye.

"Will you just listen to the buggers!" Peter still had his ear pressed to the cladding.

Leaving him to it, I started to flick casually through the old notepads. They had been penned in a neat, intelligent hand, and had obviously taken quite some time to write.

"What are these, Pete?"

Peter glanced away from the wall to where I was sitting. "They’re Pop’s memoirs. He wrote those not long after he retired."

If my mind hadn’t already been slightly anaesthetised by the Whisky, I’ve no doubt I would have been quite amazed that our Dad--we knew him as Pop--had written his memories down for posterity. But why were there two separate manuscripts?

In the days before word processors turned us all into instant editors, you had to think twice and write once, otherwise you ended up with a heap of waste paper on the floor. Pop had done the thinking and the writing and then when he had finished, he must have done some more delving into his past, and realised he had left quite a bit out. And so, he patiently started all over again with version number two. My Mother’s role in all this was initially to buy the notepads from Woolworths, and eventually to supply him with endless cups of tea and sandwiches, as he continued to write. But she also helped Pop to see through the occasional fog banks in his memory. Fortunately both their mental faculties were in extremely good working order.

I asked Peter if I could borrow the manuscripts. I wanted to read them through and maybe type them out, on a word processor of course! We were both very keen on preserving our family history, and these seemed like the sort of thing that would fascinate future generations. One day I must remember to apologise to my brother for having borrowed the original documents for so long, but the job I had undertaken wasn’t as easy as I first thought. I read through both manuscripts and was spellbound at their contents. I then decided that this was a story that deserved to be told outside the confines of our own family, and I promised myself, and my late parents that I would give it my best shot.

There were two major obstacles to overcome in my task. Both notepads covered the same span of time and the same memories, but there were facts in the second version that had been left out of the first, and to some degree, vice versa. I needed to somehow, dovetail both versions together into a fluent and chronologically sound storyline, without leaving any detail out, a task that was to prove more difficult than it sounds.

Then I decided to try and authenticate as much of the story as possible. This was a time consuming but very satisfying exercise, not only in an effort to confirm the things Pop had written, but also to expand my own knowledge of the times he had lived through. Pop was a very moral, honest and trustworthy man as well as being a totally down to earth character. His sense of humour and honour were legendary, a real ‘man of the people’. He and my Mother were both genuinely nice, loving and thoroughly decent souls. My investigations were not intended to prove or disprove the contents of the manuscripts. I knew they were true. I was genuinely interested in finding out as much as I could about the life he had lived and the things he had witnessed.

The finished product may best be described as a collaboration of words, styles and ideas, between my late father and myself, and I have added a lot of detail that was sadly missing from the original manuscripts. But as you read on, never lose sight of the fact that this is an honest and truthful account of his life as seen through my father’s eyes, and spoken through his words. Harold Kelly’s personal history was crammed with Heroes; some of them good, some of them maybe not so good, but none of them could be regarded as bad. An unassuming man with great strength of character, he would have been astonished, then quietly embarrassed if he’d known that he too was a Hero to so many. Please read his story and judge for yourself…..

1

I think back to my childhood and my earliest memory is of being on a steamship. I couldn’t have been more than two years old. In later years I was told that we had been coming back to England after spending some months in Ireland. It transpired that my mother and father had gone over to Dundalk at the invitation of Dad’s parents, who wanted him to take over a small farm and work it. Dad gave it his best shot, but being a gregarious man at heart, he soon grew tired of that solitary way of life, and came to the conclusion that he would be far better off back in St Helens. That was the town where my mother had been born and raised, and where they had met and married. St Helens was also where many of Dad’s relatives and friends from the old country had now made their home.

He was one of those people whose heart always seemed to rule their head. Why else would he abandon such a beautiful green land, with wide open vistas and clean fresh air? Why would he exchange all that for the chemically polluted back streets of a northern English town? Hard manual farm work didn’t frighten him, Dad would work until he dropped. The decision to trail his young family back to England was one he would sometimes think back on with regret. He originally came over from Ireland on a gigantic human wave of his fellow countrymen, desperate to escape the crippling poverty and near starvation of their homeland, which had precious little industry of its own apart from agriculture.

The way I see it with hindsight, Dad may have made a monumental blunder. He had come from Ireland in the late 1890s to find work and a new life for himself. Nobody can really know who or what he was so desperate to escape from? Maybe it was simply the lack of money and prospects, or could he have been hiding from the enraged father of a young Colleen who had fallen for this handsome charmer (John Kelly was later to marry and sire eleven children!), or perhaps it was the natural wanderlust of the true Celtic spirit stirring in his veins. Whatever the reason, he had turned his back on Dundalk, with its beautiful scenery but bleak outlook, only to end up in the same penniless situation in Lancashire.

Having found back breaking, sweated shift work in Pilkington’s glass works in St Helens, he battled against overwhelming odds to try and forge a decent living for himself, but with only a rudimentary education to support his dreams, his life was to be one of genuine toil and hardship. He compensated for this--and some may say he added to it--with a wife and ever growing family. Money was to be a perennial problem for Dad. Whenever he eventually fell too far behind with the rent, the family would pack their meagre belongings and sticks of furniture, loaded onto a borrowed handcart or carried by the older children, and they would set off in the dead of night, like native porters on some urban safari, to pastures new.

The years of spending twelve hour shifts in the sweltering heat of the glass furnaces and then having to walk home in the middle of the night, often in freezing rain or wind chilling conditions, took their toll on my Dad. Although he had always been a hard worker with a strong physique, his life force gave out when he was only in his fifties. After a lifetime of hard graft and nerve shattering worry, and pitifully little take home pay, heroically borne with a smile on his face and a song in his heart (he loved singing traditional Irish ballads), he was finally to find peace.

So the way I see it, Dad, having said goodbye to the loved ones of his youth, could so easily have boarded a westbound ship out of Ireland, to a bright new world of opportunity in the United States of America, but instead, he chose to go eastwards to the dark and dismal sweatshops of late Victorian England.

#

The mainly rural economy of Ireland had been decimated several decades earlier by potato famine, which brought widespread Cholera and Typhus, and forced millions of starving emigrants to seek refuge in the four corners of the world. It was estimated that disease, starvation and enforced emigration halved the Irish population in less than a lifespan, with up to a quarter million wretched souls, fleeing each year for the hope of a better life elsewhere. Even a rat-infested workhouse in England was preferable to what they had to endure back home. Amongst those who remained in Ireland were some who preached anger and retribution against their landlords in Westminster, for neglecting such a beautiful country and allowing it to decay and die. History shows that bitter Irishmen have long and vengeful memories.

John Kelly, my father was a fine strong man, standing six feet two inches tall, with hardly an ounce of surplus fat on his body. He was by nature a placid man who seemed to take a philosophical view of life’s ups and downs, although the ‘downs’ seemed to win most of the time. He was a very good singer too, having quite a repertoire of traditional Irish ballads and folk songs, learned no doubt at his own father’s knee. Mother, Mary Ann was a very bonny young woman of five feet eight inches. To those who didn’t really know her, she may have appeared as a serious and somewhat unapproachable person, but that may have been as a result of her upbringing. Her own mother had died when she was still an infant, so her father Andrew Todd, and her three elder brothers and sister brought her up the best way they could. Her only memories of her mother were those conjured up in her mind by the tales her family would tell of happier times gone by. My mother was as strong as an ox, and at times she could fly into a fiery Irish temper, which could make grown men quake in their boots. Her parents and brothers were from the Irish province of Connaught, and they made the move to St Helens just before Mother was born.

#

At the time my story begins, I was the youngest of three children, the first-born was named John after his father, then Teresa and myself Harold, a name I have always despised. To me it just didn’t seem manly enough. I must have fallen asleep in Dad’s arms and briefly awoke as we were going along the dock road, near the Pier Head in Liverpool. The night was very dark and an icy wind made me snuggle up closer to my Dad. A continual ‘clitter clatter’ of cast iron wheels of a train passing overhead, created a thunderous noise as it sped along the elevated tracks. That’s what woke me up. I looked up in wonder at the faint yellowing glow of carriage lights from the train windows as they hurried on by. I must have dozed off again because the next time I awoke was the following morning. We had been promised temporary shelter in a friend’s house in St Helens, and my cot for the night had been the inside of a large bottom drawer from a chest of drawers. It had been roomy enough--or I was small enough--for it to give me a good night’s sleep. My brother and sister had been made comfortable in other rooms of the house.

It wasn’t too many days before my parents found a house of their own to rent in Lyon Street, and Dad was given a job in Pilkington’s works as a glassmaker’s labourer. For this, he was paid the standard weekly rate of less than two pounds. In fact it was one pound, seventeen shillings and sixpence in old money, with a penny deducted to pay for the upkeep of local hospitals. In those days, manual work was physically hard and unrelenting. Bosses demanded their pound of flesh and were ruthless in extracting it from their workforce. Shifts were very long, with sixty hours per week being the national tariff for man, woman or child labourer.

Men and women were merely wage slaves but they were consoled by the fact that the cost of living was relatively cheap. A large loaf of bread cost just two pence but in spite of this, many housewives preferred to knead and bake their own bread daily. Free-range eggs--there was no other kind--were twenty for a shilling, and best beef steak cost three pence per pound. If only it was that cheap today. Those were the days when the money makers treated working class people like animals, and treated animals far more humanely than they do today. One hundredweight of good quality coal could be bought, delivered to your house and dropped down your coal hole directly into the cellar, for just sixpence. The once green pastures had been sacrificed to turn this part of the industrial North into a lucrative, thriving mining area and coal was in plentiful supply. Potatoes were two shillings for a large wicker hamper. Our house, which was pretty basic, little more than a back street hovel, cost Dad three shillings and sixpence per week to rent.

The major industrialists were making vast fortunes, owing to ‘round the clock’ working hours, and the shamefully thin pay packets they doled out at the end of each week. Unions were in their infancy and although they had just cause to fight for better pay and conditions, they hadn’t yet learned to flex their muscles and therefore, their protests were mostly uncoordinated, impotent and ignored.

To a young boy still running around in short trousers, these were blissful, peaceful years, long before the rumblings that led up to the First World War. I remember one of the first imported Edison phonographs being bought by a miner who lived in our street. He paid two shillings deposit and six pence per week on the never-never. It had a sound horn almost as big as an upturned umbrella, to amplify the music from the cylindrical records it played. All the boys in our street would recline on the pavement outside his house, in various postures of repose, listening to the voices of Caruso and Melba percolating through his open windows. Oh what gloriously happy days! Someone once wrote that music possessed charms to soothe a savage breast, well it certainly kept a little gang of street urchins out of mischief for a while. We had never heard such sounds before. The only tunes we were familiar with were those of the Salvation Army band as they toured the streets every so often, in their relentless quest to rescue lost souls. That stalwart band of warriors certainly had their work cut out in those days.

My parents were a hard working couple with never much money to go round, and in their early married life, when there were still only three of us children to care for, they were just about able to keep a roof of some sort over our heads. We could only afford to live in the cheapest rented accommodation, and that meant the worst type of housing in the roughest and toughest areas of town. When Dad yet again fell behind with the rent payments, we would have to uproot ourselves, not that we stayed anywhere long enough to put down roots. We knew the drill by now, and so we would do a stealthy moonlight flit to yet another house in another part of town. We were resigned to the constant moving from one hopeless dwelling to the next, loading our meagre possessions onto a borrowed handcart and disappearing into the deserted gloom of the night.

One of the saddest memories etched upon my mind, is not an image of times gone by, but of distant echoes. My quiet moments of reminiscence are sometimes haunted by the sound of iron rimmed cart wheels rattling across cobblestones, and the creaking and straining of the cart beneath our tiny pile of worldly goods. And the sound of our tired little feet scuffling across the cobbles in worn down shoes, and all those sounds echoing menacingly off brick wall canyons, as we slowly made our way down one gas lit street to the next in the still night air.

#

In those far off days, working class people were generally hard working, honest and very sociable to their fellow man. Industries required people to work twelve hours per shift by day or night for very low wages, with many jobs being paid on piecework rates. Workers were mercilessly exploited, as there was no proper system of checking their output, which was invariably much greater than they were paid for. National Assistance, otherwise known as the Dole, was still unknown and if a man took ill, it was God help him and his family, especially if he was taken into hospital or bed-ridden at home. It was at times like this that good neighbours rallied round and did their poor best to help.

It wasn’t uncommon for some landlord to serve a summons upon a householder for arrears of rent, even knowing there were no wages coming into the home, the bread winner having been indisposed by illness or industrial injury. The magistrate, some well-fed pompous bastard, would send the bailiff’s men to the house to take away the best of the furniture and put the rest of it out into the street, regardless of the weather conditions. Then he would order the distraught family to the workhouse for shelter, no doubt regarding that as his duty as a Christian.

These bailiff’s men were no more than tramps, often work-shy and lazy, unshaved and unkempt. Their dress code seemed to consist of dirty, ill fitting jacket and trousers, topped off with their badge of office: an old bowler hat, turning green with age and shiny with dirt and grease. They had an unwritten rule that obliged the householder (soon to be homeless), to provide them with food and drink, while they waited for a horse drawn wagon to take the possessions away. Many wagon owners would have nothing to do with these pariahs, so then the so called ‘officials’ would resort to hiring a handcart for sixpence to take their haul away, while all the boys in the street made sport of pelting them with anything that was handy, the smellier and stickier the better. I became one of the best pelters in our street. I had many such occasions to practise my aim.

2

At five years of age, I was enrolled into the world of primary education at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic School. On Sunday mornings the whole family would dress up in the best clothes we had, which wasn’t much, and we went to Mass at the parish church. My parents were good living people, both brought up in Irish Catholic communities. True to their faith, they both worked terribly hard with little in the way of life’s pleasures to reward them, and never enough money to make ends meet. There were no such luxuries like National Health Insurance or unemployment pay. The welfare state and social support were still a long way off in the future. Work or starve was literally the order of the day but on the plus side, there was never any shortage of manual work for everyone. Farm labourers were usually itinerant tramps, working on the land for bed and board in whatever part of the country they happened to be passing through. Their food and lodgings just rough wholesome farmhouse cooking and a patch of straw to sleep on in a hayloft. The farmer would pay them a few shillings each night, and after a quick dowsing at the well pump to wash away the sweat of their labours, off they would go to spend their hard won earnings in the village pub.

My parents did enjoy at least one shared pleasure, and because of this our family started to increase with annual regularity. We had one addition after another until eventually there were ten of us children. The complete family of six boys and four girls included my brothers John, Joseph, Daniel, Francis and Andrew, and sisters Teresa, Agnes, Winifred and Monica. Ten hungry young mouths to feed on a pittance. There had also been a little sister named Kathleen but sadly she died when just a baby. I’m not sure where Dad got the energy to sire such a brood of children. His shifts at work alternated between one week on days and one week nights, and when he was on nights, he would start his twelve hour stint in front of the incandescent heat of the furnaces at six o’clock in the evenings until six the following morning, and then vice versa for day work.

Dad was a gentle, lovable man and those who were fortunate enough to meet him, were soon charmed by his warm sociable manner. As well as being a good entertainer, he was also very intelligent, having been educated in no finer an institution than the hard school of life and of course, the local newspaper which he read avidly from front to back. When they first married, Dad was almost illiterate and signed his wedding certificate with an ‘X’ mark, but with Mother’s patient tutelage, he quickly mastered the ability to read and write. These skills are taken for granted today, but illiteracy was common enough amongst immigrants and native born alike, and although the skills of reading and writing held no advantages to the ordinary working man, they were a matter of pride to those who had struggled to acquire them in adulthood. At the end of the week, Dad would have in his pocket for spending money, the reasonably affluent sum in those days of five shillings. He didn’t smoke but enjoyed his pint. Beer was only three halfpence per pint and it was usually a very potent brew at that.

It was only at the weekends that the majority of men could afford the time or money to enjoy a few drinks with their pals. Public houses were generally open all hours, with some even staying open for business into the small hours of the morning, until the last customer staggered off in the general direction of home. One would often see in the early evening, a publican standing at the door of the saloon bar with his arms folded across his chest, waiting for passing trade. Their unofficial uniform seemed to consist of a long white apron concealing a well developed beer belly, rolled up shirt sleeves and waistcoat, all topped off with a bowler hat sitting at a jaunty angle on a well groomed head.

There would always be a generous amount of bread, cheese and pickles on the bar for any hungry customer who called in for a swift half; a well intentioned amount of ale to slake a raging thirst, but which usually developed into several pints. It was quite common for parents to take their children into the pubs in those days and Dad took me in occasionally, whenever he was doing a bit of shopping for leather to repair our boots. Bad language was never heard in the pub, as any self-respecting landlord wouldn’t allow their customers to display such a lack of common manners or morals. Any drunkard who couldn’t hold his ale like a man, would be unceremoniously turfed out onto the pavement. Women had to wear a hat and be accompanied by a male, and even then they were only allowed to sit in the parlour, well away from the ‘Men only’ parts of the pub. These visits were very infrequent, as women would criticise each other unmercifully, so the more timid ones wouldn’t be seen entering a pub under any pretext.

One Sunday morning after Mass, Dad took me into a pub called the ‘Bird in Hand’. I well remember my astonishment when a couple of men gave me a halfpence each, a rare treat. They were old friends of Dad and one of them produced from his jacket pocket, a very large potato and proceeded to peel it carefully with a penknife, then he cut it lengthways into two halves and deftly scraped a hollow in the middle of each piece. From another pocket he took out a brown paper bag containing a couple of little dead sparrows, which had been plucked and cleaned. I stood watching him spellbound. He gently placed the sparrows into the cavities of the potato, liberally dusting them with salt and pepper from the bar top, and then he secured the halves together with a large iron nail pushed right through the centre. He then asked the publican to put it in the oven range behind the bar to cook. There was a big fire blazing in the grate and in a short while, a mouth watering smell permeated from the ventilation grille in the oven door. I believe this was a practise commonly performed in pubs those days. I looked around and could see everyone including my Dad, licking their lips but the man wasn’t about to share his Sunday lunch with anybody!

#

One Sunday in the middle of summer, at about midday; I think it must have been midday because I seem to recall having pains in my stomach, no doubt from hunger but then I was always hungry as a child. I was playing on the Town Hall Square when I heard a drum and fife band far off in the distance. As the music gradually got louder, I felt a rush of excitement as I eagerly awaited its approach. When the band eventually came into sight from Hardshaw Street, I was wide eyed with amazement as I witnessed a long procession of men in sailor uniforms, carrying a profusion of brightly coloured flags and banners, followed by a throng of women in orange coloured blouses and hats. I didn’t have a clue as to who or what they might be.

A young man started to cross the road in front of the band, apparently deciding to join his mates who were viewing the advancing procession through a pub window. The Drum Major, a large barrel chested man, resplendent in his brightly coloured uniform, was leading the band. He swung his heavy staff skilfully around his head, throwing it high into the air and catching it again as he progressed a few paces further along the road. He must have taken exception to this pedestrian who dared to cross right in front of his line of march, for he deliberately took aim and soundly cracked the man across his collarbone with the heavy end of his mace. The young man fell heavily to the ground and rolled into the gutter with a terrible cry of pain.

Immediately all hell broke loose. Utter pandemonium. Men, some still clutching half finished glasses of beer, began to pour out of the pubs around the square. Some went to the assistance of their friend who was writhing in agony in the street. Others swarmed around the Drum Major like angry wasps with vengeance on their minds. In no time at all there was a terrific ‘free for all’, with what seemed like hundreds of men and women fighting, mauling and kicking each other. There was no allowance made for age or gender; old and young alike, men and women, gave as good as they got. The contingency in the procession were soon outnumbered as word spread like wildfire from pub to pub, street to street, and house to house, and it was they who were mainly on the receiving end of the fray.

The Police Station was situated near the Town Hall and within minutes, several Bobbies were valiantly struggling to restore some sort of order but it was a thankless task, as they themselves became targets of the ungovernable mob. Mounted police reinforcements were called in and they were soon charging into the crowd to try and quell the fighting. The poor horses went berserk with pain as women took long pins from their hats and plunged them into the animals’ hindquarters. This caused the bewildered horses to rear and plunge with hooves flying, throwing their riders to the ground, only to be battered and kicked where they lay, in a ferocious frenzy of mindless mob violence.

The fighting seemed to last for ages, ebbing to and fro across the square and spilling into the side streets. Through sheer exhaustion on both sides, the melee seemed to ease off gradually, until the final pockets of resistance eventually ran out of steam at around five o’clock in the afternoon. The people of the invading Orange Lodges turned and fled in total disarray, pulling off and throwing away their brightly coloured sashes and uniforms, and carrying or dragging their injured colleagues with them. The tramcars in which they had arrived, went back to Liverpool with barely a pane of glass still intact. I don’t know what became of their drums, flutes and banners but I can vouch that they never took them back to their lodges in Liverpool.

To me, it seemed as though I was a passive witness to a battle and in fact I was. I had never seen anything like it before or since. I watched more in amazement than fear, amazed that people could behave in such a shocking and unchristian manner towards each other. At the onset of the violent eruption, I had sought the relative safety of a tall lamp post near the Town Hall, and I shinned up it to have a good vantage point above the seething crowd. I sat on one of the cross arms, which was used to support the lampman’s ladder, with my arms wrapped tightly around the big glass lantern, but my slender perch seemed in constant danger of being uprooted by the turbulent mass of fighting bodies below me.

Later that evening at home, I overheard my parents and their friends excitedly discussing the events of the day, and discovered that these processions regularly attempted to stir up unrest throughout the industrial towns of Lancashire, noted for their prominent Irish Catholic communities. As a result of this day of violence and damage, all future parade organisers had to seek permission from the council before they could march through the town. I believe the Orange Lodge and their warring factions have never attempted to this day, to march through such towns as St Helens, Wigan or Widnes. The cost would undoubtedly be too high.

#

Christmas was always a joyful and happy time for us. This was one time of the year that our parents threw caution to the wind to make sure we had a real feast on Christmas Day. I suppose it would equate to just a normal Sunday lunch by today’s standards. Our Grandad, Andrew Todd, who lived alone now that his own children had all grown up and fled the nest, would always spend Christmas and Bank Holidays with us, his youngest daughter’s family. He was a medium sized man, slightly built and not overweight, with silver grey hair cut in the fashion of the day, extremely short at the back and sides. His steel blue eyes shone out from a weather worn face, furrowed by a lifetime of industry. His face, so full of warmth, friendliness and fun, seemed to suit the spirit of Christmas very well.

I always remember him being smartly turned out; highly polished boots, neatly laced in a precise military style. A gold watch chain arching downwards across the front of his waistcoat, suspended between a buttonhole and side pocket. A stiffly starched collar with rounded corners, held tight in place by brass studs. Grandad had left his native County Mayo many years before and when he spoke, he did so softly with a gentle Irish brogue; the rough edges of his accent worn smooth by many years of living amongst his English neighbours.

Toys were very cheap and plentiful, and a child could have it’s stocking filled for the price of a few coppers. The toys were imported from Germany and very good quality they were too. After a sumptuous dinner on Christmas Day, which had no doubt stretched Mother’s culinary talents and Dad’s pay packet to their limits, Dad and Grandad would go off to a local Rugby match in the afternoon.

Rugby was a great form of recreation for thousands of working class men, and I used to watch them as they walked along the road to the football ground. Then I would follow at a discreet distance until I got as far as the turnstiles, in the hope that I could somehow sneak inside unnoticed. But having no money, not even the single penny that would have been my entrance fee, I would be turned away and had to revert to plan B. I would then gain admittance by climbing a precarious side wall, fingers and toecaps searching blindly for gaps in the rough mortar joints, and as I neared the top, being helped up the last few feet by some of the spectators already on the inside of the ground. All clubs were compelled by law to engage at least one policeman and to pay for his time on duty. More often than not the clubs did the very least that the law required of them, so there was usually only one policeman to patrol the entire stadium and I was pretty sure that I would never get caught.

#

At Whitsuntide every year--I think the practise may have now died out--all the schools had a religious procession around the town. It was a splendidly prestigious affair with banners flying and a brass band, accompanied by choirboys and church dignitaries leading each school. The children were decked out in new clothes, new to them but more often than not they were just ‘hand me downs’ from older brothers or sisters. The boys of each school had to wear a cap with the school crest above the peak, and a broad blue ribbon sash draped across the shoulder. Each scholar would take a penny or a halfpenny to the teacher on Monday mornings to pay for the costume. The cap cost 6½d and the sash was another sixpence. I will always remember with burning indignation, the Whit Monday of the year 1909, when the headmaster Mr Dilworth, cruelly humiliated my brother John and me during the Whit Walk.

You see, some months previously, my father had taken dangerously ill with pneumonia, due no doubt to continually enduring twelve hour shifts in the burning hellish conditions of the glassworks, then having to trudge wearily home through extreme wintry conditions of freezing rain, frost and snow, without so much as an overcoat for protection. He simply couldn’t afford one. Whilst all the time, he was breathing in a corrosive mixture of lung searing smog, produced by the endlessly belching chimneys of the many chemical works scattered throughout the town. We couldn’t even afford the medication prescribed by the doctor. Housewives and neighbours generally had their own age old remedies, including goose grease, boiled linseed oil and Spanish liquorice, with a hot cast iron oven shelf placed in the foot of the bed to induce sweating. This would be helped along with plenty of wholesome broth and a big roaring fire in the bedroom grate. If you hadn’t any coal left to burn, friends would usually manage to keep you well supplied with pieces salvaged from the local slag tip.

We were living literally from hand to mouth and couldn’t afford any spare pennies to take to school. When the time for the Whit Monday walks drew near, John and I were the only two boys in the whole school not to be given a cap or sash, as we simply hadn’t paid for them. A few weeks before the walks, Dad was still quite ill but had recovered sufficiently to return to his sweated labour in order to keep his family from starving. He was hopelessly sliding into a downward spiral of debt. Just imagine: no sickness pay or government assistance, just living off the benevolence of good neighbours who were hardly better off than we were. How did we get through?

In times of quiet reflection, I often find myself thinking of Dad; just a thoroughly decent, hard working man, a wage slave. I can well imagine that he would be earning a fortune at today’s rate, with his strength and speed of work. What a giant of a man he was; reliable and conscientious, and eternally optimistic that having seen his family suffering the worst deprivations and heartaches, things could only get better for us all. How my parents suffered due to poverty and criminally poor wages. May God enlighten the people who dare to refer to them as ‘the good old days’.

And then there was my poor mother. When I recall it all now, it brings tears to my eyes, to think of her trying to rear a small army of kids on next to nothing. Sweating over a dolly tub, washing bedclothes to take to the pawnshop. Then at night time, I can see her sitting beside the apology for a fire in the grate, made up of cinders and slack and anything else that would give off a little warmth to dry the laundry. I see her now, surrounded by starving kids, our bellies aching with hunger and with nothing more than a hopeless future in front of us. Some people may ask: ‘Why did they have so many children, when conditions were that bad?’ The answer is quite simple. Both my parents were brought up amongst strictly religious Irish communities, where the role of the local priesthood was to indoctrinate the populace from ‘cradle to grave’, in order that they may reproduce a steady stream of ‘little parishioners’ to swell the ranks of the Roman Catholic church. This was compounded by a general ignorance or lack of birth control techniques. Most people didn’t even have a basic knowledge of sexual matters. All such things are taken so much for granted these days.

She sits with head in hands, giving vent to uncontrollable sobs. Such conditions as these were the breeding grounds of revolution and socialism. The same conditions would soon bring about food riots and much worse, just over a thousand miles away in Russia. But there was a tiny glimmer of hope for our family. My big brother John, who was about four years my senior but still only a boy himself, confided in me one morning when we were getting ready to go to school, having just devoured a small piece of bread and treacle for breakfast.

"Harold, I’m not going to school today," said Johnnie quietly out of Mother’s earshot, "I shall walk to Wigan and tell Grandad that we’re all starving." Grandad Todd was a foreman on the London North Western Railway. "When you get home this afternoon, tell Mother not to worry. Everything is going to be all right." He was a very grown up and mature lad for his years.

When Johnnie finally arrived at Wigan, a long trek for a young lad, which must have taken him several hours on foot, he went straight to the railway station and asked for Andrew Todd. Grandad was duly sent for and was very surprised upon seeing John, and instinctively knew that something must be terribly wrong. When he heard Johnnie’s story, he got leave of absence from his manager and took Johnnie to his lodgings. He took a few gold sovereigns from a strongbox he kept under his bed, and they went back to the railway station, where they boarded the next available train to St Helens. They kept themselves busy on the journey by making a list of things the family would need.

When they reached their destination, Grandad and Johnnie went on a shopping spree. First stop was a grocers shop in the town centre, where they ordered and paid for a selection of foodstuffs from the list they had prepared. Then off they went to a butchers shop for a joint of beef, which to Johnnie was the most enormous piece of meat he’d ever set eyes upon. They then made their way to a local farm and ordered a large hamper of potatoes to be delivered that evening. Finally they called into a colliers yard to order a ton of coal. When everything promptly started to arrive at our house, Mother immediately set to work and busied herself preparing food in her newly stocked kitchen.

We were in clover. Grandad Todd gave Mother sufficient money to clothe us all with the bare essentials to keep us warm and looking respectably dressed. He wasn’t a rich man by any means, but he would have given his last penny to look after his people. His wife had died when Mother was just a baby, and he seemed to hold a special place in his heart for his youngest daughter and her family. If there is a Heaven and I truly believe there is, I know that my Grandad will surely be there. We all looked up to him and loved him dearly. He was our guardian angel and Santa Claus all rolled into one. We eagerly awaited him coming to stay with us each Christmas and I remember, before we went to sleep at night, he would kneel down by our beds with us children, and encourage us all to pray along with him.

It was the Friday before the Whit Walk that Grandad came from Wigan to help us out of our immediate predicament, but there was still the problem of the caps and sashes. So the next day Mother, now with some spare cash jingling in her purse, went to the headmaster’s house and pleaded with him to sell her two caps, but apparently they had all been distributed amongst the other boys, and there were none to spare. Mother hurried round to Dromgoole’s clothiers shop in Liverpool Road and bought two caps which Mr Dromgoole, in his best salesman’s manner, assured her were almost indistinguishable from the ones which were to be worn by our school. But on bringing them home, it was soon obvious to Johnnie and me that there was a marked difference.

The official school caps were in dark blue, divided into six segments by gold braid and bearing the Sacred Heart crest over the peak. The caps that Mother had been sold were a lighter shade of blue, with yellow ribbon forming four quarter panels and bearing no school crest at all. Mother hadn’t been able to acquire any sashes for us. As an innocent eight year old, I was as proud as a peacock trying on my new cap, the first I’d ever worn, and all that mattered was that I could now take part in the walks.

So on Whit Monday morning at ten o’clock, Mother took us along to the school. The boys, all chattering with excitement, were assembled into two groups in Banner Street. A band was at the front, waiting to perform, and immediately behind them were a group of white robed choirboys from Sacred Heart church, followed by men holding religious banners aloft. Mother pushed me amongst the smaller boys at the front. Then she took John and put him with the bigger boys at the rear. Suddenly the band began to strike up a lively marching tune and we all moved off to the beat of a big bass drum, on the start of our parade. The proud parents and friends who had been milling around, all moved off for better vantage points near the centre of town. We were so excited to be taking part in what seemed to us a very prestigious occasion, and had only advanced a couple of hundred yards down Westfield Street, when I was violently jolted backwards as someone grabbed me firmly by the shoulder, and a man’s voice growled as he pushed me towards the pavement, "Go home Kelly, you have no right to be here!" It was the headmaster Mr Dilworth.

I stumbled as he pushed me forcibly onto the pavement amongst a lot of women bystanders, and when asked what was the matter with the boy, he told them that I was feeling sick; such a blatant lie. The women sympathised with lots of ‘tut-tutting’ and ‘there, there, never mind’ and told me to go home to my Mother. I was numbed with shock, not realising at the time the reason for my expulsion. I stumbled into the nearest back alleyway and unable to stop my emotions erupting, I sobbed my little heart out. Through a cascade of tears, I could see the procession slowly passing by and getting further away, and as I walked home choking back the sobs, my world seemed to be crumbling.

I remember feeling an overpowering sense of guilt, for what, I didn’t know. Perhaps I thought I had let my mother down in some way. I had done nothing wrong and yet had been so publicly humiliated and lied about. Even to this day, the emotional scar lingers on and I can almost feel my blood rise up with passion, whenever I think of the injustice of that incident all those years back, in nineteen hundred and nine.

I made my way home through a maze of back alleys and angrily threw the cap into a corner of the living room. My mother was still out following the procession and no doubt wondering where I’d got to. Just a few moments later, the door banged open and John stormed in. Mr Dilworth had given him the same brutish treatment. We sat at the kitchen table, bathed in a mood of sullen gloom and before long, Mother came home with a few of the neighbours. When she heard our story, she went wild with rage and was about to go to the headmaster’s house to seek revenge. The other ladies managed to restrain and pacify her, otherwise she probably would have landed him a punch on the nose, and no doubt landed herself in court.

When we reluctantly went back to school after the Whit holiday, Mother--she could never be described as a shrinking violet--came into the assembly with us and made Mr Dilworth hang his head in shame, for the home truths she bestowed upon him. However, although he had always appeared to carry out his daily duties with an undisputed relish for discipline and punishment, sometimes bordering on brutality, he seemed to reserve an extra large portion for the Kelly boys after that.

3

Feeding and clothing an ever increasing family never seemed to get any easier. Pawnshops were doing a brisk trade, with Monday being their busiest day of the week. A man’s one and only suit of clothes and possibly his best boots, would be taken into hock to pay the weekly rent, and to put a little food on the table for the next few days. Second-hand shops and market stalls were the salvation of many working class families, but it was a second-hand pair of boots costing just pennies, which nearly ended my short life and caused me to lay in hospital for over a year. This was to be one of the greatest tragedies in my life.

At the tender age of nine years old I was admitted to the Cottage Hospital in Peasley Cross, with severe blood poisoning in my left foot. It was caused through a pair of boots, which my mother had bought for three pence from a stall in the market. Our family had grown so large by this time, that it was very difficult for my mother to feed and clothe us all on Dad’s meagre earnings. Being on piecework, he had to continually graft at top speed to make anything like a decent weeks wage. In spite of Dad’s cobbling ability at home--he always seemed to be mending one pair of boots or another--I was running around almost barefoot. The only footwear I possessed was a pair of cheap canvas pumps. These had taken such a pounding from the pavements that the soles had all but surrendered. So in her desperation, Mother resorted to stitching thick cardboard cut-outs into the pumps as replacement insoles, but in bad weather, I simply squelched about within minutes of raindrops hitting the ground.

What a heartbreak it must have been for the poor woman, not much money coming in and no hope on the horizon of a decent living for us. Life was one continual battle for the basic human necessities of food, clothing and footwear. There were no family grants, no health service, no school meals, nothing to help the larger, less fortunate families. Oh yes, I am deceiving you, there was something which the privileged classes made great play of in the capitalist press. There were of course the workhouses. Remnants of these Victorian edifices were still thriving in the early part of the twentieth century. There were also the Police Clothes.

When a family was destitute and in rags, they could apply to the Chief Constable for free clothes. After a lengthy third degree examination, with official visitors invariably coming to inspect the house, no doubt to ensure that the family were sufficiently downtrodden and threadbare, only then would the children be fitted out with clothes. These were made of Corduroy and of such a style that they almost shrieked out ‘POLICE CLOTHES!’ presumably to deter people from trying to pawn them. They were of such a hideous fashion as to be instantly recognisable to anyone. Even in times of utter desperation when people had nothing left but their dignity and pride, very few families applied for them.

The system was for policemen to have a voluntary ‘copper’--no pun intended--deducted from their wage each week to help clothe the destitute children. But why should there have been any deprived and hungry children in this great, rich man’s country of ours? Surely there was enough wealth being produced throughout our vast Empire, to ensure a decent standard of living for all it’s subjects. There is an old fashioned saying: ‘It’s the poor that help the poor’, and it was true. How could one expect the politicians in Westminster to understand what we were going through, when they rarely deigned to dirty their shoes in the soot grimed towns of Northern England? They didn’t even need to come and canvass for votes amongst the masses. It would be several years before men were given a democratic right to independently vote for their political masters. Women would have to wait a little longer before they were treated to the same rights.

One Saturday morning, Mother went to the market and bought these cheap leather boots. She thought they might fit me, and on the off chance she brought them home. They were a tight fit but with a struggle she persuaded them onto my feet, thinking no doubt they would stretch with wear. I ran out to play in the street and naturally in a very short time, they rubbed the skin raw and caused severe blistering to my heels. I was also wearing a new pair of long black stockings she had bought for two pence. These had been imported from China and when these cheap socks were washed for the first few times, the water invariably turned as black as ink. Consequently, the dye seeped into the open wounds caused by the blistering, and in an incredibly short time I started to suffer bad pains. Severe blood poisoning travelled rapidly through my entire body, causing excruciating agonies and making my limbs swell up to alarming proportions.

I was almost at death’s door when a horse drawn ambulance came to our house and a man carried me downstairs swathed in blankets, and accompanied by my mother, I was taken to hospital. That same afternoon, I was operated on and lost a lot of blood, with tubes inserted into my body to drain the poison away. I woke up the next day with screens around my bed and I was feeling very poorly indeed. The sister and nurses were ever so gentle and kind. They knew that I was dying.

But I was a strong little boy, having developed a good constitution before this setback. You see, when I was hungry, which was virtually all the time, I would scrounge pieces of raw meat from the slaughter men in the local abattoir, and I took great enjoyment in chewing it like gum. Meals at home tended to be of the vegetarian variety, but not out of respect for animals. Meat was expensive and we simply couldn’t afford it. The surgeon Dr Kerr, when told about this carnivorous habit of mine, believed that it probably helped to save my life. Hospitals in those days were run entirely on charity, with each ward being sponsored by some local factory or business. The employees volunteered to have a penny deducted from their weekly wage to help with the running costs. Soiled and bloodied bandages were sent to the washhouse to be boiled in a solution of carbolic acid and when clean and dry, they were distributed amongst the recuperating patients, even those who were bedridden, to be rolled up and used again. No doubt this exercise was regarded as a pioneering form of physiotherapy, albeit a terribly unhygienic one.

St Helens in those days was an absolute mass of factories and coalmines, occupying a vast sprawling area of the township. Each was connected to the main railway lines by hundreds of miles of branches and sidings. Houses were built without any great social plan in mind, but were simply thrown up in the shadows and fume clouds of the factories, in what was known as the ‘vilest town in Lancashire’. This wasn’t a condemnation of the people, who I still think were some of the bravest, friendliest and dearest souls I have ever met. No, this label was given to the town as a result of the stench and filthy outpourings from its industrial hellholes. People had to be brave, or desperate to live there. During this time, my parents uprooted the family yet again. They never moved very far, and many of the streets, if not the actual houses we children were born in, now occupy the very centre of town.

Mother came to see me twice a week on the only permitted visiting days of Wednesday and Sunday afternoons. All that you were given to eat in hospitals was bread and margarine to go with your own boiled egg for breakfast. There was also a sloppy mess of potatoes, punctuated with a few small pieces of meat for dinner, and boiled barley in lieu of rice pudding as a dessert. For tea we had bread and jam. Families and friends were expected to bring food in for the patients, usually eggs and biscuits or a little fruit. It was well known for some of the less caring nurses and cleaners to steal articles of food when the patients were asleep.

A nurse came around the ward each morning and taking an egg from your locker, she would write your name on it with an indelible pencil and add it to all the others in the pan to boil. These eggs were very small indeed. Someone told me they were imported from China, but that seemed so far for a little egg to travel and arrive still intact, and fresh! However, if your egg was bad, which it often was, you just existed on the small portion of bread and margarine that was your allotted ration.

The benevolent owner of some local factory paid for the services of surgeons and doctors to work in the hospitals. When a rich person was preparing to meet their maker, it was the practise to bequeath a small portion of their wealth in their will, to go to the local hospital. No doubt they saw this as one way of staking their claim to a place in heaven. I had two serious operations and they were very crude affairs. Dr Kerr cut the heel bone and part of my ankle away, which has left me with a badly disfigured left foot and to this day, I find it impossible to wear shoes and even have great difficulty in getting boots to fit.

Pilkingtons, the great firm of glassmakers, generously provided two doctors for Peasley Cross Hospital. The surgeon named Kerr and a Doctor Siddall. The company was probably well ahead of its time in looking after the social and medical needs of its workforce. There was a surgery at the glassworks, with a doctor and nurse in daily attendance in case of accidents and illness during the daytime. Each boy employed by the company after leaving school at fourteen years of age, was provided with a brand new overcoat to keep him warm when going to and from his work.

#

After a year of continually lying in my hospital bed, I was a very thin, weak and pale young chap. As I slowly began to recover, one of the nurses would lift me out of bed and stand me by the foot of it, then she would drop to her knees a few paces away and beckon me to walk towards her, which I had great difficulty doing in my weakened state. However, after a couple of weeks, I could proudly hobble the length of the ward, my face a mixture of grins and grimaces. The nurse in charge, Sister Murch, would come into the ward every evening and after seeing that the patients were comfortable, she would kneel by a table in the centre of the ward and say her prayers. She was a God fearing woman and everyone respected her enormously. I might add that juveniles shared the same rooms as grown-ups. There were no children’s wards as we know of today.

After spending so long in the cottage hospital, I came to regard it as my home – warm, secure and comfortable. Until then I had never known the luxury of having a bed entirely to myself. There were many times, especially when I lay awake at night, when I felt desperately lonely and longed for my family and other children to play with. More than once, this tough little boy cried himself to sleep. I remember my brother John coming to see me one day and his visit filled me with embarrassment. He had been working down a coal pit alongside grown men, and himself still just a young lad. He was doing his best to help the family out in any way he could. John’s face, hands and clothes were blackened with coal dust, and he was told in no uncertain terms by the nursing staff, to keep well clear of the bedclothes to avoid soiling them, but Johnnie didn’t mind. Hadn’t he endured worse tellings-off than this by Mr Dilworth? He was an honest lad, very mature and understanding for his years. As brothers, we were also the best of pals and I’m sure he must have been missing me at home.

After John’s visit was too quickly over and I was on my own once more, a feeling of guilt and shame descended over me. What was happening to me? Had I become so institutionalised in this place, that I couldn’t remember my other world just outside these four walls? I had spent so long within this clinically clean environment, that I had been embarrassed at my brother’s grubby appearance. I felt that I had somehow betrayed him and my family, and I went to sleep that night feeling terribly saddened and more homesick than ever before.

Eventually I recovered from my illness and the day finally drew near for me to go home. It was a time of mixed emotions for me. Like any young lad, I had a lot of running around, climbing walls and kicking footballs to catch up on. I’d had no one to play with for ages and I hadn’t seen my younger brothers and sisters, or my pals for such a long time. But I hadn’t felt hungry for a long time either. I hadn’t felt the bitter cold emptiness of a coal starved fireplace in winter. I hadn’t suffered wet feet for want of a decent pair of shoes for almost a year. In honesty, there wasn’t much in the way of creature comforts that I had really missed, but I was going to miss the sister and nurses once I had left the sanctuary of the hospital, to go back to whatever fate had in store for our family. Sister Murch tried desperately hard to adopt me. She came from a well off family and had grown quite attached to me, as I had to her. Sister Murch--I never knew her first name--had shown me an undivided affection, bordering on motherly love that I had never really felt before. She wanted me to have a good education and a secure future but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She was determined that her brood would stick together as a family, through thick and thin.

Mother was not an uncaring woman. Like so many others, circumstance had thrust her into a lifestyle beyond her control. Without any sort of education other than an elementary ability to read, count and sign your name, the way out of the trap of poverty and ignorance was barred shut. Birth, marriage and death were the unholy trinity that governed the lives of millions. Birth welcomed you into a life of austerity, hunger and despair. Marriage started out as a misty eyed diversion from the rigours of daily life, but the veil soon lifted to reveal unexpected pressures and responsibilities. Women worked from dawn to dusk at home, and the mantle of breadwinner rested firmly on the husband’s shoulders. Death, usually prematurely, often painfully, was the only way out. One generation handed the same legacy down to the next.

So in due course my mother took me home. She had in her own unique way, fashioned a suit of clothes for me out of a man’s second-hand cast off, which she had probably bought at the market. It was a small size to start with, but once she let loose with the scissors and sewing needle, it just managed to fit my growing body. I shudder to think what it must have looked like on me. Better than the police clothes, I hope. Thankfully our lack of a full length mirror spared me that embarrassment. Due to my mothers good wholesome ‘no-frills’ feeding, I slowly regained my strength and was soon running about, although with a pronounced limp, at school playtimes.

Not long after my discharge from hospital, my younger brother Francis was taken ill with Measles, but his condition quickly deteriorated when he developed Broncho Pneumonia. He died just days short of his sixth birthday. Frank was a lovely, lively little boy with sandy coloured hair, but he had always been a delicate child. It was a particularly harrowing time for my parents to have endured so much tragedy, but their courage and spirit never seemed to waver, and they fought hard not to show the rest of us children, how much they must have been hurting. After Frank had gone, we all grieved in our own way and I felt terribly robbed. Robbed not only of a year out of my life spent in hospital, but of a year that I had missed out, with the little brother I was just getting to know and love so well.

#

We lived in Gilbert Street at the time we lost little Frank. It was only a short street of a dozen brick built terraced houses on each side. I always thought of it as a ‘friendly’ street, where all the neighbours seemed to enjoy, or endure each other’s company. Whichever it was, there always appeared to be a number of them standing outside their houses in fine weather, jangling away to each other. Amongst our neighbours, there lived two simple minded characters who were rag and bone men. They couldn’t afford a handcart and so they would trawl the streets for miles around, collecting all their merchandise in old sacks slung heavily over their backs. They were both about twenty five years of age. One was a big, rough looking, red haired individual called Patchet, a nickname he was universally known by. Whatever clothes Patchet was seen wearing, whether they were his day to day working clothes or his ‘Sunday best’, they were always covered in a myriad of patches. It looked as though he himself had sewn them on with large undisciplined stitches. His hair the colour of flames, matched his unpredictable temper, in spite of which, Patchet was really well liked around the neighbourhood. He was always good to the local kids and old folk, and ever willing to go to the aid of the underdog.

Patchet’s lifelong friend and business colleague was a short and skinny, dark haired chap named Paddy Connor. They were the best and most inseparable of pals. Nobody in their right mind would employ either of them, and so they had to eke out an existence the best way they could. Patchet lived with his old widowed mother, and it only took one glance at their house to realise that he brought his work home with him. It was overflowing with the junk he collected on his daily meanderings around town. We would always see him and Paddy coming wearily home with full sacks slung over their shoulders, to be deposited noisily in one of Mrs Patchet’s rooms. Once inside her house, the junk never seemed to emerge again in the same quantities. We would occasionally hear the odd metallic clattering coming from the house at night time, as Patchet or his mother tried to clear a passageway through all the old kettles, pans or whatever scrap was piling up in there.

Old Ma Patchet--not her proper name of course but nobody seemed to know their real surname--was as odd a character as her son. She tried her best to keep him reasonably presentable but failed miserably at each attempt. Now and again Patchet could be seen sitting on the back doorstep, with his little old mother standing behind him, wielding a large pair of scissors at his head, and cutting great indiscriminate chunks from his hair whenever it grew too long and tatty.

Silent movies had only recently arrived in St Helens, and the shows were packed out at every performance. Every Saturday night without fail, Patchet and his mate Paddy queued up outside the local cinema and paid a penny each to sit in the cheap seats, just a row of wooden forms at the front, close up to the screen. When they came out after the show, they would go into a nearby pub called the Saddle Hotel and over a pint of beer, they would relive the amazing scenes they had just witnessed on the screen. After drinking up, their weekly ritual led them to a tripe shop to buy a pound bag of tripe pieces for a penny. From there, they would then go and stand at the corner of Gilbert Street and tuck into their meal beneath the green glow of a gas lamp. I can only imagine that this must have made the tripe look even less palatable than it already did.

A couple of doors from us lived a family of grown ups named Grundy. There was Nellie, a powerful, handsome young woman who worked in the glassworks. She was about twenty one years old and a harum-scarum young woman--she’d be called a tomboy today--with a glint in her eye and a mischievous way about her. One Saturday night she noticed Patchet and Paddy, heads bent over their paper bags and enjoying their supper as usual, and as she sauntered past them with a ‘devil may care’ attitude, Nellie took a wide swing of her arm and hit the two bags of tripe into the air with an almighty wallop. The bags flew high and reaching the top of their flight, they upturned and pieces of tripe fell out and flew everywhere, scattering all over the flagstones. In spite of being slightly disabled, Patchet dropped sharply to his knees howling, "Mother of Jaysus, that mare has destroyed me luvley supper!" While at the same time, Paddy was frantically zig-zagging around the street, chasing a stray dog that had grabbed the biggest portion of his tripe.

The ensuing commotion was street theatre at it’s funniest and could have been a scene straight out of a slapstick comedy, which just happened to be Patchet and Paddy’s favourite type of entertainment. Episodes like this caused a great deal of merriment and brightened the lives of ordinary folk, who seemed to take this sort of thing in their stride. It’s a far cry from the present day when people tend to be more insular and spend too much time indoors watching soap operas, hardly ever knowing who their real neighbours are. I find it all quite sad.

#

Another balmy evening in summertime, my mother was standing in the street passing the time, chatting with a couple of her friends. An old man living on his own directly opposite our house, had his bedroom window wide open at the bottom. It was about nine o’clock and the heat of the day had been stifling, with not a breath of wind to provide any cooling relief. The old man was in the habit of saying his prayers aloud before retiring for the night, and everyone in the street outside could hear him. Nellie Grundy’s younger brother Billy, suddenly leapt up off the edge of the pavement where he had been sitting, playing his harmonica. He ran over the road and as nimble as a monkey, he climbed a vertical rainspout, which ran beside the old man’s window. In one smooth movement, he slipped quietly through the open window, and seeing the old man kneeling at the foot of his bed with his eyes closed, Billy pulled the bedclothes over the old chap’s head. To add injury to insult, Billy then lifted up the man’s nightshirt and gave his bare backside a resounding smack. He then made good his escape by dashing down the stairs and through the front door. In no time at all, Billy was sitting on his own doorstep, playing a lively tune on his mouth organ. By this time, the old man’s Latin prayers had given way to some very choice Anglo Saxon oaths. He disentangled himself from a tumble of sheets and blankets and leaned out of the window, cursing and ranting with everyone in the street below, all of whom casually declared that they hadn’t seen a thing.

Mischief seemed to be a prominent trait of the Grundys and just like Nellie, Billy was a bit of a joker and always playing tricks on people. The Corporation men emptied the bins in our district each Friday at around midnight. These men were a scruffy lot and they smelled pretty awful too, but they always seemed ruggedly healthy and robust. They wrapped pieces of sacking around their legs and wore sack aprons to protect themselves against the constant manhandling and spillages from the bins and pails, which contained every type of household waste, anything from potato peelings to excrement. On calm windless nights, they would stick a piece of lighted candle on top of a backyard wall near to their horse drawn cart, to shine a little illumination while they performed their unpleasant duties. There were very few street lights in those days, except in the main thoroughfares.

One still summer night, Billy was finding it hard to sleep with the noise and the heat, so he opened his bedroom window wide and observing the shadowy figures of the bin men, he started to sing these words at the top of his voice:

"Oh, the Corporation muck cart was full up to the brim

The driver overbalanced and he found he couldn’t swim

He came up to the top and he grabbed a Navvie’s turd