25 August, 2025

England in the Summer of 2025 & Visits to Preston Flea Pits that Still Influence my Life & Beliefs

England in the summer of 2025 is not a pleasant place. The sun might shine, but the atmosphere tells a different story, a story of hatred and lack of compassion, of intolerance fed by ignorance, of self-interest and large chunks of self-pity. In Epping and across the country “patriots” don flags of St George and Union flags and profess their love of “Engerland” fed by their own inadequacies, by social media, and by the gutter press. Tabloid newspapers and social media cheer on these patriots draped in their flags as they howl their mindless protests outside hotels housing refugees and asylum seekers. I wonder how many of these patriots who extol the virtues (as they see them) of St George who, legend has it, slew the dragon and displayed the “English values” they so highly and hypocritically prize, could recite the words to the school hymn that I sang throughout my own schooldays and my own teaching career? The words of the hymn “When a knight won his spurs” say nothing about waving flags, chanting hate filled messages or sending those in need away without succour. They do, however say much about the virtues associated with knighthood, about being gentle yet brave, of being Godly, of being joyful and not angry and greedy, and of being truthful – that last a commodity in short supply on the streets of “Engerland 2025” where falsehoods, misinformation and downright ignorance are preferred to honesty and truth by these marauding flag draped vigilantes:

When a knight won his spurs, in the stories of old,
He was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold
With a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand,
For God and for valour he rode through the land.

No charger have I, and no sword by my side,
Yet still to adventure and battle I ride,
Though back into storyland giants have fled,
And the knights are no more and the dragons are dead.

Let faith be my shield and let joy be my steed
'Gainst the dragons of anger, the ogres of greed;
And let me set free with the sword of my youth,
From the castle of darkness, the power of the truth.

Last week the wife of a Tory party politician was released after a few months in jail for inciting hatred when she posted on social media that hotels housing migrants and asylum seekers should be burned down. The Daily Mail, other tabloids and much of social media treated her as a returning hero. Strangely, I don’t anywhere remember singing anything about burning or killing anyone (except dragons) in the hymn but I do remember a reference to a “castle of darkness”. The phrase “castle of darkness” didn’t have a lot of meaning to me as a ten year old when I sang it in school assemblies but it does now in 2025; it is surely what England in the summer of 2025 has become. Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, many years ago said that the success of his newspaper was because each day 'I give my readers a daily hate.'  Nothing has changed over the many years since he said that – either at the Daily Mail or on England’s streets; one of the “English values” so highly prized by the Mail, other

tabloids and the flag waving patriots on the streets is clearly hatred of our fellow men and women.

 

In talking of English values – if there is such a thing - they rant on about mosques and about Muslims and Hindus and other “unchristian” faiths threatening our way of life, they complain vehemently about “foreigners” taking our jobs. But when I visit my consultant in hospital it is likely that he will be from abroad. At my local GP practice out of the seven GPs listed five are of Indian extraction. Our health service and caring professions could not function without these people from “unchristian faiths”. And I often wonder why this should be so. Why do our medical schools each year pour out huge numbers – perhaps even a majority - of doctors/nurses etc from non-white English backgrounds. Why do the government have to seek doctors, nurses and other carers from countries far away to fill the gaps in our own provision? There will be many reasons, but one can safely assume that ultimately it boils down to the fact that we English, we born and bred patriots, don’t want to take on these caring responsibilities -  we only want exciting jobs or jobs that pay better or jobs that fit in with our preferred life style choices. Few, it seems, in 2025 white England, want to serve or care for others. Perhaps these patriots should consider this in their obsession with English values – that our values are such that we are unwilling to care for our own and must rely upon foreigners to do it for us; a sad and telling indictment of our national psyche and “values” indeed. But, to come back to the hymn, serving others was the whole essence of the knights of old; it was the essence of St George and his rescuing of the king’s daughter from the evil dragon, and it surely is a mainstay of not only the Christian faith but all other faiths. Sadly, I can only conclude that the parable about loving our neighbours in the New Testament, the tale of the Good Samaritan who protected, tended and cared for the injured man, a foreigner, on the roadside, would get short shrift from the raging, hate filled flag wavering “Christian Patriots” outside the hotels hosting refugees and asylum seekers of Epping and wider England in the summer of 2025.

 One might say that our present discontents are merely an aberration, a particular response to the very specific issues associated with the mass movement of people that we have experienced in recent years. There is clearly much in that view but history tells us that we English have a track record in hatred and “othering” people. In the 1930s Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts bullied and clashed with police on the streets of London and other cities. Mosley, an early version of our present day Nigel Farage and right wing agitator Tommy Robinson, had high society and royal connections and wielded huge influence over both the press and the mob preaching hate and division to huge gatherings, especially against Jewish people. And a generation later black and Asian immigrants arriving at our English ports answering the post war call from our government to come and work to help England, the mother country, get back on its feet after the war were met not with a warm welcome but with signs on doors saying “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs”.

 In writing the above paragraph I could not help my mind wandering back to my own childhood. I lived throughout those years in a small working class street in Preston Lancashire. My father was a quiet, unassuming, kind, gentle and humble man but someone with whom I did not develop a close relationship with until later in life.  He was, however, and I even more so now believe it today, someone to look up to. I once read that it is the destiny or maybe the responsibility of every son to exceed the dreams that his father had for him. I don't know if that is true but I do know that if I can be thought of as the sort of man my dad was then I will be more than satisfied. My mother, sadly, was a different “cup of tea”. When I was very small she stayed at home, a housewife, but once I went to school she returned to her job as a weaver – and it has always been a great sadness to me that although I knew that she loved me dearly she was also a woman not to cross or challenge in any way. In modern day terms she could have a row with herself if she was alone on a desert island and anyone who did not fit in with her view or beliefs about the world was the subject of her ire and venom. As a child I often cried myself to sleep having heard her screaming at my dad – my sobs partly fear and worry for myself but also sadness for my dad who bore the brunt of her rage which could flare at any moment. It was a regular occurrence in our house for my mother to vent her spleen on those she hated or despised – the blacks and Asians (of whom there were none in our area), the Irish (of whom there may have been some) and the Catholics (of whom there were several) -  this latter section of the local community were given special treatment by my mother because at the end of our street was a large Catholic Church, St Joseph’s, a place, which if you believed my mother was not far removed from Satan’s kingdom! Looking back from today, I can imagine my mother cheering on the flag waving patriots with their hateful chants outside asylum seeker hotels and applauding the bile of the Daily Mail and social media; today’s crowds would, I know, speak for her. Where I looked up to my dad, I feared my mother. I knew I was loved and never mistreated, indeed the opposite – but her angry outbursts and harsh view of people and the world worried and frightened me; it was a source of constant anxiety that lasts to this day. As I grew into my teenage years I promised myself that I would never, ever, lose my temper or rage at others. I knew the effect it had on me and how it might effect others. Now, at eighty, I take a small pleasure in knowing that I have largely kept my promise even though sometimes I know I have been thought naïve, a soft touch, or spineless or worse.

My dad died about 20 years ago, my mother having died three years earlier. I have always regretted that I did not have the close father/son relationship with him that some enjoy. He was a long distance lorry driver often away for much of the week and on top of that when he was at home there were frequent, and for me very painful, rows usually about money. We were not a well-off family; each week my dad worked long hours, gave my mother his unopened pay packet, rarely drank or had any obvious luxuries (apart from his weekly packet of fags), did most of the cleaning of the house at weekends and cooked Mum’s breakfast and then Sunday dinner as she rested in bed till noon reading the News of the World or doing her crossword much loved cryptic crosswords at which she was an expert – a skill that I have inherited.  I can never once, throughout my childhood and teenage years, remember mum saying “thanks” or giving any word of praise to my dad, nor were there any signs of affection. My mother didn’t do hugs to him, to me – or to anyone else, a thing that still today, is something I feel very anxious about. In our contemporary world where hugs of greeting or farewell amongst family and friends are accepted and normal I feel uncomfortable, highly embarrassed even, when in a situation where this is expected. The regular rows and my mother’s vitriol coloured my childhood and still haunt me even now a lifetime later and it made relationships difficult within the wider family, not just within our own little family unit. My mother had a fractured relationship with her sisters and brothers which meant that with one exception – my much loved auntie Edna, “Nenny” I called her till the day she died - I grew up knowing that I had a wider family but only rarely, and in some cases never, being part of it.

 As a result, although opportunities for dad and me to do things together were limited, when they did occur, they were, and still are today, precious to me. I loved my mother and feared her in equal measure, but as a young child, I was aware that she was a not an easy woman to please and that dad couldn't win - whatever he did. He was always to blame – for our lack of money, for anything that went wrong in the house, for not being there two or three nights a week when he was on the road; in my mother’s eyes all the ills that beset our little family where down to dad.  One of the few precious moments that I enjoyed with my dad, was, however, when we occasionally went to the cinema together – just him and me. I would have liked my mother to have come as well – I longed for a sense of us being a “happy family” - but that just wasn’t us; she wasn't one for the cinema, so it was usually just us two, dad and me. And as the years have passed those cinema trips have become more important to me. Now, if one of the old films we saw together is repeated on TV I'm a sucker for it.  It takes me back to the darkened cinema, to the heavily made-up usherette with her torch guiding us to our seats and at the interval standing with her tray of ice creams – what a treat that was! Then, on the way home, we often enjoyed fish and chips eaten from the newspaper making that shared couple of hours with my dad – without my mother’s hovering presence – a time when I didn’t have to worry myself that a sudden row would break out as so often it did when my mother felt aggrieved about something. As we walked the dark Preston streets on our way home, eating our fish and chips, I knew that mum would almost certainly be in bed when we got home so the chances of another row were lower. I would not, I knew as I ate my chips, be sitting on the top step of the stairs weeping and terrified, my mother screaming in the kitchen at my dad and beating him with her fists as he stood, silent, allowing her to do it. Those trips to the cinema were far more than just a nice evening out – they were, for me, a relief from the brooding, intensity of life with my mother, a thing that coloured my life and relationships with both her and my dad until the very day that she died – and still do today.

 This was in the mid-fifties and in those long gone days Preston, like other towns seemed full of cinemas; in the town centre there was the Ritz, the Palladium, the ABC, the Empire, the Gaumont and more. To occasionally go into town to visit one of these gilded palaces was a real treat – I can remember feeling almost like a movie star as we paid for our ticket and then made our way to our seats in the highly decorated venues. Going to the town centre cinemas, however, was rare we usually stayed closer to home. Like other towns, there were local cinemas in abundance only a few hundred yards from our Caroline Street doorstep. But in all honesty the term these places a ‘cinema’ is probably a bit over the top. They were what were called 'flea pits', small picture houses where a cheap night’s entertainment could be had before the age of mass television. I can still remember, and smell them today: 'The Guild', 'The Queens’, 'The Plaza', 'The Carlton' – all within a short walking distance of our little terraced house. Every Saturday afternoon I would call for my school pal Billy Masheter who lived on Outram Street and we would go to the Guild and watch black and white films of Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix or Roy Rogers fight the gun slinging cattle rustlers and the red Indian hordes or we would be amazed by the science fiction future of the heroic Flash Gordon doing battle against the evil Ming the Merciless. But that was all kid’s stuff to fill our Saturdays. My dad and I on our occasional nights out saw sterner stuff; films like 'Paleface', 'Genevieve', 'Robin Hood', 'Davy Crockett', 'The Robe', 'The Ten Commandments', '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', 'Son of Paleface' , 'A Kid for  Two Farthings', 'The Cockleshell Heroes', 'King of the Khyber Rifles', 'The Dam Busters', 'Shane', 'High Noon', .......the list goes on.

 Today, all these years later, I'm still a sucker for these, what I call real films, not the violent rubbish that fills our screens today. Films with real heroes, likeable people, where the 'good guys' are good and the 'bad guys' get their due punishment! Many would say they are 'naff', twee, old fashioned. Well, that may well be the case – they certainly don’t contain the violence or seamy side of life so often portrayed in modern films.  They speak of a gentler life and honourable action – something to aspire to and make you feel good. For a youngster they were portraying worthwhile values – albeit a bit twee. I would argue this is much more savoury than the values so often portrayed to the young in modern films – violence, excess, foul language or soft porn. Who cannot empathise with the ultimate hero, Shane? - a man who portrays all that is best in human nature. A man of few words: quiet, unassuming, dignified. No violent foul mouthed Clint Eastwood figure this. I defy anyone not to empathise with the feelings of Shane as he stoically and unflinchingly takes the abuse from the Ryker gang and doesn't rise to their bait. And no-one could fail to breath a sigh of relief as he faces down the psychopathic gunslinger Jack Wilson – good triumphing over evil and doing it with calm dignity. Or, who cannot feel anxious and want to help Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane in "High Noon" as, on his wedding day, he desperately tries to enlist the help of the town folk to face the dreaded Miller gang? Nor can I believe that any normal person cannot be moved by the story of young Joe as he looks after the sickly little goat he has bought at the market believing that it is a unicorn in 'A Kid for Two Farthings'. As I write this I can still feel the anger and anxiety as I watched Sam, the honest, hard working young man, wrestle with the dreaded and evil Python Macklin (played by the huge wrestler Primo Carnera) in “A Kid for Two Farthings” whilst the crowd bay and Sam’s girlfriend Sonia (played by Diana Dors) averts her eyes from the punishment that Sam is receiving! I can still hear my dad that evening leaning over in the darkened Queen’s cinema in Tunbridge Street and whisper 'That's Primo Carnera, Tony - he's a nasty, big headed, 'bu**er'! 

I have often reflected that it is by such quietly whispered words or casual conversations over the tea table that children learn right and wrong, or learn of the things that their parents and adults in general believe, aspire to and expect. It is through such interaction that we learn what it is to be grown up. My dad's whispered words that night (and other nights) in those dark cinemas have remained with me and I can still hear him today seventy years later. I didn't think of it in these terms then, but looking back they spoke to me of things that I should value and that my dad believed in - fairness, honesty, thought for the underdog, of not being a bully and of not being big headed…... And, his words did it in a far more effective way than a lecture from my mother or telling off from her would ever have done. 

Maybe I'm reminiscing through rose coloured glasses but I can still remember the quiet kindly wisdom and wonderful voice of David Kossoff playing Mr Kandinsky, the Jewish tailor, as he talked to little Joe about life and death when Joe’s 'unicorn' finally died - as we all knew it would. I knew that Mr Kandinsky was everything that one should be, and it was so because the film told me and more importantly my dad did, too, by the way he reacted to the story. I might be naive, and I’m certainly a sucker for the old films but I often reflect that our world has become so rich in genius but so poor in wisdom and simple understanding of the important aspects of the human condition.

There seem so many things that perhaps we have lost – and many of these are the stuff of Mr Kandinsky, Shane or Marshal Kane and the films of that bygone age. In the final minutes of the film 'Shane' Joey, the young boy in the story, pleads with Shane to stay and look after him and his family. But Shane points out that he, Joey, can be a hero: “Look out for your Ma and Pa and you’ll be a hero.......Anyone”, says Shane, “can learn to shoot a gun, ride a horse and enjoy an exciting life but that doesn't make him a hero”.  Yes, yes, yes..... I know it’s naff, Hollywood drivel, soft soap, cheesy - not what we say and do in our clever and fast moving 21st century world where we blast the bad guys with our X-Box and watch techno-digitally enhanced cyber adventures that provide no moral context or worthy aspiration and omit very core aspects of humanity: empathy, compassion, understanding or nuance.  Somehow a scowling Clint Eastwood uttering those immortal words “Make my day Punk” before gunning his enemy down don’t have the same humanity, compassion or moral coherence as the heroes of yesteryear.  But as I get older I know that Shane’s comments were just the sort of thing my dad understood. And, my worry is that if our modern world does not portray these basic “wisdoms” and human values through the media, if our 'heroes' – sports stars, celebrities, politicians.........and most of all parents -  do not reflect such values  and offer a way of life to give young people something worthwhile to believe and aspire to, then where else will tomorrow’s adults get them?

Now, as an eighty year old I can see the wisdom of 18th century philosopher and politician Edmund Burke when he said "Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarise or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe”. And the thoughts of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre are in my view certainly true: "Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues….”. Like the old fashioned films words like “manners” and “virtue” are now, in our brash modern world, a bit twee, old fashioned, but they are implicitly and explicitly the human characteristics  that was the theme running through these old films and the character of their heroes – Shane, Mr Kandinsky, Marshal Kane, Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, and the rest. When they are not present then we are, as Burke suggests, debased and barbarised; empathy and kindness, goodness and honest action are sidelined. One need only look at today’s divided world: Gaza, the vilifying of  certain groups, the savage comments on social media, an American President who is an anti-hero in terms of being a role model, violent demonstrations by flag waving hate filled “patriots” intent upon making our government act in a hostile way towards refugees, films and TV filled with expletives, coarse dialogue, and gratuitously violent and explicit storylines…….all of these are what we now subliminally soak up from the media and in doing so we are on danger of accepting barbarism, debasement, coarseness and violence as the new normal, immune to kindness, honesty, decency and doing the right thing.  As I look back and think of my dad I know that although he never read philosophy and would have never claimed to be learned he had great wisdom. He might have said “I’m only a lorry driver” but the reality was that he knew about decency and honest honourable action; he knew about the sort of virtues envisaged in the hymn I mentioned. He understood all this completely and unlike the flag waving “patriots” on “Engerland’s” streets in the summer of 2025 he would know just why these virtues and old-fashioned heroes were important to life and to his son growing up.

Nowadays I'm just a grumpy old man, a sad old git, but my trips to the cinema – or, in our case, the back street “flea pit” - were for me more than nice nights out, cowboys and Indians, ice creams and fish and chips.  They were, at one level, one of those growing up things – a few longed for hours with my dad, a bit of what we might call today “male bonding”. But their long-term effect has been that they are still today very much part of my life’s compass, fundamental to who I am and what I believe in and to my very being! They are, at the root, the reason why I know with absolute certainty that those draped in their St George’s flags, screaming abuse and hate at "others ", less fortunate than them in “Engerland’s” summer of 2025 are so very dreadfully and terribly wrong.

 

 

22 August, 2025

Another Time, Another Place: Holidays Memories from a Lancashire Childhood

It was the silence I remember most. The silence and the empty streets. It was walking down New Hall Lane past the huge Horrockses Mill and not hearing and feeling the pavement shake under my feet as if some great earth movement was taking place caused by the vibrations of a thousand flying cotton shuttles, ten thousand click clacking Jacquard cards and hundreds of thumping, roaring looms between the hours of 7 and 6 every working day when cotton was king and England’s bread hung by Lancashire’s thread. It was the silence caused by the absence of the sirens calling the workers to clock in at Horrockses (picture right). That mighty building is now, I understand, used as flats and office accommodation but to me it will always be Horrockses Mill. It was the same at all the other mills: Paul Catterall, Emerson Road the Cliff spinning mill and a host of others in Preston. And at the end of the working day the clocking out bell or siren was silenced and the Preston streets were  not filled, as they were for the other 50 working weeks of the year with thousands making their way home after their labours. It was the factory chimneys like smoking belching cathedral spires reaching to heaven but now asleep for two weeks and it was the closed factory gates of the great heavy industry employers: Leyland Motors, Goss and English Electric. It was the absence of people and their chatter; streets no longer filled each day with Lowrie like figures, women, weavers and spinners, gossiping as they made their way to their looms or to their homes at the end of their daily labours; younger women headscarfed, laughing, linking arms across the pavements and their older mothers or aunts with shawls draped across their shoulders and some wearing Lancashire clogs. It was the men, fewer than the women, flat capped and clogged or heavy booted: the cotton dust speckled tacklers who kept the looms running and the Jacquard cards cleverly producing the exquisite patterns on the finest cotton cloth produced in the world, and it was the coal and oil spattered furnace and engine room workers who laboured deep in the bowels of these cathedrals of cotton - their voices filling the streets with talk of their next fishing trip “down Ha’penny Bridge”, or "t'Acregate Club fer a game o’ crib or dominoes and a pint o’mild", but mostly it was  of “Our Tom, t’phantom winger” - Tommy Finney, Preston’s great son and England's greatest footballer - and of Preston North End’s opening game of the season in early August against United or City or perhaps the mighty Arsenal.

It was the closed shops – only the local Coop, the butcher or the fish and chip shop trading – and then only at restricted opening hours. It was the Saturdays, throughout July and early August when New Hall Lane became, for that one day each week, a one way main artery. New Hall Lane  was the main road at the end of Caroline Street, my childhood and teenage home, and it was the main road from Preston and Lancashire's west coast to east Lancashire and west Yorkshire. Along New Hall Lane each and every summer Saturday morning coach load after coach load of happy and expectant holiday makers passed down the Lane from the east Lancashire towns – Blackburn, Accrington, Burnley – and the west Yorkshire towns – Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, Sheffield –  all on their way to Blackpool, Southport of Morecambe for a week’s fun, rest and recuperation from their daily grind. And, later each Saturday afternoon, those same coaches returning, now filled with other holiday makers returning to their Lancashire or Yorkshire mill town homes, their week of building sand castles and eating candy floss or sweet, sticky, sand encrusted pink rock on Blackpool sands done. Their dancing the waltz or the quickstep, or the Gay Gordons in Blackpool Tower’s ballroom to the music of Reginald Dixon playing the Tower’s mighty Wurlitzer organ, or riding the Big Dipper on Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach now over for another year. The “Wish you were here” saucy postcards had been sent to friends and neighbours back at home, the last bed breakfast and evening meal enjoyed at the chosen guest house, the last pint drunk in the Devonshire Arms, the last fish and chip lunch at Bellamy’s Fish and Chip Restaurant consumed and the last stroll along the Golden Mile taken. It was the Lancashire and Yorkshire holiday weeks.

The last two weeks in July: Preston’s Wakes Weeks when for two weeks the whole town, as with other Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns, closed down. Each town varied in their “Holiday Weeks” but always the same two weeks every year – always during July and August. Everything closed, towns like Preston became almost silent. The great industrial engines stopped pumping, workmen’s overalls were put away, shops remained mostly closed. It seemed as if the whole world and its landscape changed. Looking back with the rose tinted spectacles of age it seems now as if the sun always shone. Perhaps it was because the factory chimneys were no longer belching their smoke, clouding the air that the silent, narrow streets of tiny terraced houses always  seemed to be forever in bright sunshine or deep shade as the sun made its journey across the now smoke free, clear, blue Lancashire sky.

And each year, throughout much of the 50s (until, in 1961 when my Mother and Dad purchased a third hand Morris Oxford – TTC 472 - of their own) for one of those two Preston holiday weeks a car sat outside our little terraced house in Caroline Street. It was nearly always a ancient pre-war Standard 8 borrowed from one of my Dad’s many dubious work contacts. It would be nice to say that we hired a car in the way we might do today – a shining, valeted, top of the range modern model from Herz or Avis, but it was not. A few pounds would have changed hands for the use of the vehicle while its owner didn’t need it, and it was always – even to my young eyes – well past its sell by date – creaking, noisy, often belching smoke. But all of that was inconsequential, it was our magic carpet as my Dad ferried us like lords and ladies around Lancashire and sometimes beyond for days out. Looking back, it was no holiday for my Dad – as a lorry driver he spent his every working day on the road so to spend his holiday doing the same must have been a busman’s holiday – but he never complained, never once needed a map, never got lost, never allowed the car to break down. He was up early every morning checking the oil, the water, the tyres, adjusting the  points, the tappets and the spark plugs – all the things that we rarely, if ever, have to do with today’s cars  and day after day for a whole week, year after year he took us safely to places both well known and new. 

He would pick the car up early on Saturday morning and by shortly after 10 o’clock we would be on our way – five of us, Mum and Dad, me and my Auntie Edna and Uncle Joe - me squashed on the back seat between Edna and Joe. The Saturday trip was always, every year, to Blackpool for the day and this was no coincidence. Saturday was change over day in Blackpool for the thousands of visitors who were coming to stay for the week or going home their holiday done so the town itself was a little less crowded. We would chug along the 17 miles or so to Blackpool and by late morning had parked up on the roof of Talbot Road Bus Station car park. Then the walk to the “front”, coming out opposite North Pier, the sea spread before us, the green and cream Blackpool trams plying their trade rattling along through the crowds of holiday makers. One year – it would have been in the late 50s – as we got to the end of Talbot Road and stood at the zebra crossing waiting to cross over to the North Pier and the sea there was a great commotion and we suddenly realised that we were standing next to Ken Dodd the great comedian as he made his way to the theatre on the Pier for the matinee performance where he was the top of the bill star. People were asking for his autograph and Dodd, the consummate entertainer, didn’t stint, he stood in the middle of the zebra crossing, signing hundreds of bits of paper, newspapers, anything to hand while I stood, open mouthed, and the great man patted the heads of children, smiled and wished their parents well and, of course, cracked a few jokes as only he could – while cars and trams backed up along the sea front unable to get past the throng.

Then it would be Bellamy’s for our fish and chip dinner - being northerners we didn’t eat lunch, what we ate at noon was dinner! – including bread and butter and a cup of tea! And from Bellamy’s, Joe and my Dad would find a bench on the front and sit looking out to sea while my Mother and Auntie and I would wander around Lewis’ (not John Lewis!) Blackpool’s big department store at the time. I would have much preferred to stay looking out to sea with my Dad and Joe but I was no fool; my Auntie, I knew, always had a bob or two to spend and if I played my cards right I was sure of a little gift or three during my tour around Lewis’! And so our day went on, meandering down the Golden Mile, a stop at Madam Tussaud’s wax works to see the Queen, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Matthews, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby and a host of other famous names and great events all looking to my young eyes just like the real thing. And no trip to the waxworks was complete without a visit to the Chamber of Horrors to witness mediaeval torturers at work, or the murder of the Princes in the Tower by Richard III, or Henry VIII’s wives losing their heads, or infamous murderers Buck Ruxton, John Christie, Ruth Ellis and others sitting in their cells waiting to have the noose looped around their necks by the nation’s chief executioner Albert Pierrepoint. I can remember gazing at the wax model of Pierrepoint as he placed the noose over the head of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955. As we stood looking at the grim spectacle, I can remember my Uncle commenting that he had been chatting to Albert only a few weeks before when he and Edna had gone for a Saturday afternoon Mystery Tour with Bon Chance Coaches - a Preston coach company. The coach had stopped at the Rose and Crown on the way back so that all the passengers could enjoy an early evening drink. Albert Pierrepoint (as his father and uncle before him) had been the UK’s chief executioner for over two decades and ran the pub on the outskirts of Preston, to provide a regular income between executions. “And”, said Uncle Joe, “Albert told me, she [Ruth Ellis] never said a word, calm as you like she was when he put the noose over her head”.

And so, our day in Blackpool progressed. By late afternoon I would have had a ride on a beach donkey, enjoyed candy floss or ice cream and we would have taken in the many pleasures of the Pleasure Beach – played the slot machines, ridden on the waltzer or been frightened on the ghost train. And we would all stand – as we did every year – and laugh until it hurt as Auntie Edna laughed, tears running down her cheeks as she stood before the mechanical model of a manically laughing clown in the entrance way to the Pleasure Beach. All the fun of the fair! - and by mid evening, as the July sun set over the flat Fylde countryside, I would be nodding off between Auntie Edna and Uncle Joe as we made our way homewards. The holidays were here and as my eyes closed I would hear the adults discussing where we would go tomorrow, should we pack up some sandwiches, is the forecast good?……….and then I was asleep.

For the following six days we would travel the length and breadth of the northwest: Chester Zoo, the Lake District, North Wales, Morecambe, Southport, the Trough of Bowland, the moors of West Yorkshire, Ingleton Falls……. I can still smell the bottle of meths bought from the local chemist as Dad poured it into the little primus stove, bought so that we could stop on the roadside to have a “proper cuppa char”. He and Joe would hover over the little tin stove until the whistling kettle signalled its job done and then pour the boiling water into the china tea pot and then into the china cups (with saucers!). We would eat our picnics off china plates complete with all the trimmings – cotton serviettes each with plastic serviette rings, salt and pepper, brown sauce, milk from a china jug with a little crocheted cover made by my Mother “to keep them damn flies away” – this was a 1950s version of glamping! No short cuts, everyone turned out immaculately – Joe and my Dad with stiff collars and ties, shoes shining, trousers with knife edge creases, my Mother and Edna turned out in their best frocks – all very 1950s. But, we weren’t alone. In those long-gone days people didn’t dress down; being on holiday was an excuse to look your best – no shorts or skimpy shirts exposing yards of bare flesh or tasteless tattoos. Look back at old photographs of places like Blackpool in the 50s and the crowds all looked well turned out and taking a pride in their appearance – even when on the beach sitting on their deck chairs. For working folk like my Mother, Dad and Auntie and Uncle who spent their lives in the cotton mills and heavy industry dressed in their overalls, like thousands of worker ants, surrounded by grime and heavy, energy sapping, graft, and at the beck and call of the clocking on and clocking off hooter, their annual holiday was a time to be different, to have a little dignity, to take a pride in their appearance, to be seen at their best. A feeling of personal self-worth which simply made them feel good. Maybe I’m wrong but I know that’s how I would have felt that!

And there are other wonderful memories when I think of those far off days. As we rolled along through the Lancashire countryside Edna and Joe would sing, me squashed between them – songs which today would be frowned upon as being non-PC: “My brother Sylvest, he had a row of 40 medals on his chest, big chest……”, or “We are Fred Carno’s army, no bloody good are we”, or “I’ve never seen a straight banana”, or “The two Preston mashers from down our street”, “The laughing policemen”, and “Oh it’s a windy night tonight, tonight, tonight….”; war time songs, music hall songs, songs of the pubs and clubs; risqué (although that word or its implications meant nothing to me, they were just silly songs which made me laugh), often racist or sexist. They would definitely not be broadcast on TV or radio today and if they were then there would be a trigger warning prior to the the programme telling listeners that  they will hear “discriminatory, using language which some viewers might find upsetting or offensive”. Like the Chamber of Horrors no longer part of the Madam Tussaud’s “experience” and the saucy seaside postcards of big bosomed ladies and sexist suggestive comment, they are of a bygone era, now too often erased from our shared history but for me, leaving us the poorer for it. Maybe I’m wrong.

As I write this, the sun streaming through the slats on my office window venetian blind, I am reminded of Auntie Edna and her calamine lotion; the sweet pungent smell still in my throat even after all these years. Edna could reasonably claim to be bitten by every insect that has ever lived, they sought her out like Exocet missiles. So peer into her voluminous handbag and one could not fail to be impressed by the range of creams, potions, dressings, pills and other aids. If we stopped in some country layby for our picnic or afternoon cuppa before she emerged from the car she would encase herself in calamine lotion – and usually insist that I was similarly treated!

And at the end of most days we would return to Preston by about 9 o’clock, tired and I suspect grubby but the
next day’s outing already planned. The day, however, was not over. Most nights Dad would park the little car in Mercer Street at the side of the New Hall Tavern – Edna and Joe’s favourite local pub and they, plus Dad, would disappear inside for a drink – Joe and Dad having half of mild while Edna had her usual bottle of OBJ (O Be Joyful) light ale. I would remain in the car with Mum who rarely, if ever, drank. Dad would bring us crisps and lemonade and for the next half hour I would sit behind the steering wheel of the car pretending to drive, being Dad, putting on the handbrake, moving the gear stick as I had watched my Dad doing, stretching my legs to reach the pedals, making engine noises as we swept down make believe roads to Blackpool or Chester or Ingleton Falls – wherever we had been that day. And half an hour later they would emerge from the Tavern, their breath and clothes smelling of beer and cigarettes and the little car would trundle the last few yards up New Hall Lane to Caroline Street; the end to a perfect day.

A few years later, when we had our own car – TTC 472 – the Preston holidays would continue much as before – but with a more reliable and slightly larger car we often went a little further afield. Early starts and late night returns to Gretna Green, to York and Harrogate, to Coventry to see the newly opened Cathedral in 1962, across to the other side of England to Bridlington, to Stratford on Avon to see Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, and to Scarborough. How my Dad kept this up I will never know, no motorways to sweep along at speed and gobble up the miles and a car full of chattering, singing people. I am always in awe when I think of him; I know with absolute certainty that much as I love driving I couldn’t do it! But he never once complained or let us down.

And, on one of our trips in the early 60s when I was about 16 we stopped one night at a pub on the outskirts of Preston – the Rose and Crown at Much Hoole. I guess we had been to Chester or North Wales for the day and it was there that I had my first underage half pint of shandy. I sat, feeling very conspicuous, between my Dad and Joe hoping the police would not raid the pub and discover my illegal boozing as they supped their halves of mild. And as I sipped my shandy I gazed at the smartly dressed, balding, smiling gentleman, the landlord, Albert Pierrepoint (picture right), pulling the pints behind the bar, his round face just as I remembered it from Madam Tussaud’s where, in his other life, he had stood unmoving, noose ready to slip over the head of Ruth Ellis – just as he had done with 434 other condemned men and women (including 210 in Germany after the Nazi War Trials). 

It was all so many years ago now; another time, another place but those Preston holiday weeks still live with me, fresh as yesterday in my memory.

19 August, 2025

"THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY": Memories of a Lancashire Childhood - Donkey Stones, Parrots, Dandelion & Burdock, Prejudice, a War Hero & Nebber, a Treasured Childhood Pal.

My childhood was spent in a tiny two up two down, no bathroom, outside lavatory, no hot water terraced house in Preston. It was one of the millions of houses built in the middle years of the 19th century for the millworkers in the northern mill towns. Despite the humbleness of the houses, however, there were certain expectations on behalf of the residents of these streets. These were not written down or legally imposed but vigorously and rigorously reinforced by the women of these narrow streets – woe betide any woman who did not keep the frontage of her house up to scratch!  Windows had to be kept clean, net curtains washed with regularity, door knockers polished and above all the concrete paving flags, door steps and window sills of the property’s frontage were scrubbed and “donkey stoned” weekly. Any woman of the street failing to abide by these “rules” would be shunned, be the recipient of withering glances and searing comment in the local shops, and protracted discussion behind closed doors and net curtains! For the uninitiated, donkey stones were made from a mixture of pulverised stone, cement, bleach and water and were like a small, thin brick or large tablet of soap. Each week (or more often) northern housewives would wash their front door steps, window sill and the concrete flags outside the house. While the flags and step were still wet they would be scrubbed with the donkey stone. As they dried the flags, step and window sill took on a “cleaner” hue. Different “shades” of stone could be bought (or even got in exchange for a few bits of old clothing or junk from the Rag and Bone man) ranging from what we might call off white to beige but all did the same thing, provide a bit of “cosmetic   surgery” to make the house, humble though it was, look clean, attractive and a bit brighter. It was a bit like putting wet chalk on the concrete and then rubbing it in. I assume that the scrubbing and the bleach content of the stone did indeed clean the concrete - especially so since in those days towns like Preston were smoke filled and grimy from the millions of chimney pots pouring forth their smoke and dirt but I suspect it was also about giving the house a cared for effect,  about giving your humble house a bit of dignity and confirming a personal pride in yourself  and your home.  Many a child – myself included - on occasions too numerous to count, received a clip round the ear or slapped leg having stepped on the newly stoned door step and thus  left a foot print. It was common to see men return home from work and remove their boots and hop over the newly stoned door step lest they incurred the wrath of ‘er at ‘ome!

There was, however, one resident of Caroline Street who did not abide by the “rules” of the street and she lived immediately next door to us. Ma Woodacre (as she was known by all) was a law unto herself and whilst not exactly breaking the rules with gay abandon certainly did her own thing. The result was that it wasn’t so much that she was considered merely eccentric by my mother and the other local women – but she was the butt of barbed criticism, whispered venom and no little interest!To my young eyes she seemed very old – indeed, she had a grown up son, Gordon, who was also the recipient of the street’s bile. Gordon was a rather seedy looking character with a gaunt face and whispy hair and did not, I learned from the street gossip, have a “proper” job which was in itself a reason for comment. He seemed to spend his life emerging from the house, closing the door behind him and scurrying down the street, always it seemed to me in a bit of a rush and always looking suspicious. This was the early and mid fifties and as I slowly gained more understanding of the world I learned that Gordon earned a dubious living by being a “bookie’s runner”. In those days “off course betting on the horses” was largely illegal with none of the betting shops that fill our High Streets today. So placing a bet was a dodgy business performed in smoky bars and dark alleyways with a local  bookmaker – or “bookie”. The “runner” was employed by the book maker to collect bets and bring them along to him – and to occasionally distribute winnings. This kept the “bookie”, who was operating illegally, in the shadows, removed from the person placing the wager but, of course, the “runner” also had to be careful so that he too didn’t fall foul of the local Bobby!

It was an everyday news item in the local newspapers that the police had apprehended and fined bookie’s runners; in short, for runners “run ins” with the law were an occupational hazard which probably explained Gordon’s furtive behaviour on emerging from his front door! In Gordon’s case the local criticism was of two kinds: he was judged to be a lazy individual who should “get himself a proper job” by the women of the street, including my mother, and it seemed to me that Gordon was clearly related to the Devil since, I was told, he spent so much time in the many pubs in the area and was involved in this nefarious pursuit of gambling. He was a lost cause and, by association, Gordon’s dubious life style was blamed on his mother, Ma Woodacre. I don’t think that in all the years that we lived next door to the Woodacre’s I ever heard Gordon speak or see him speak to anyone – or indeed do anyone any harm - he just scurried in and out in his creased grey demob suit and occasional trilby hat looking the very epitome of a shady character – a real 1950s “Spiv”!

 Despite the opprobrium and scorn poured on Ma Woodacre and her offspring the reality was that little was seen – or heard - of her. She rarely emerged from the house and I can only rarely remember seeing her go to the local shops where, in the days before supermarkets, everyone went: the local Coop in the next street, the butchers, the newsagents the baker, the fish and chip shop or the tripe shop all in New Hall Lane at the end of our street.  The only time I can remember her regularly emerging from the house was each night – usually at about 7 o’clock - when she would hurry down the street to Mrs Knowles’ off licence.
In her hands would be a large stone flagon, complete with cork stopper, and a large stone jug which Mrs Knowles would fill to the brim and as Ma Woodacre walked back up the street, holding the corked flagon and jug with care one occasionally saw froth  run down the side of the ancient jug, leaving a trail of drips on the pavement. We were used to the stone flagons with the cork stopper in those far off days – you could take them along to the off licence at the corner of the street and get them filled up with whatever was your tipple. There was also a man who came around each week with horse and cart selling lemonade and other soft drinks – he, too, would fill up the flagon. Many families (my own included) had several flagons which were kept specifically to use as hot water bottles in an age when central heating and such was unknown to ordinary folk. But the fact that Ma Woodacre seemed to get hers filled up every night was clear evidence to all and sundry behind the net curtains of Caroline Street of Ma Woodacre’s debauched and dissolute  life style. Then, of course, there was the associated question:  Ma Woodacre did not work so where did the money come from that subsidised this boozy life of Riley” as my mother oft put it?  The life style and finances of the Woodacre household were a regular subject of much speculation in Caroline Street’s whispered conversations on doorsteps and behind net curtains. I often heard my mother mutter when gossiping with a neighbour about Ma Woodacre “It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken”.  The meaning, even to my young ears was clear: good honest folk work hard and do the right things (like scrubbing the door step with a donkey stone!) but those who weaken and give in to the deadly sins of the world – greed, drunkeness, idleness, lust and the rest - have an easy life. In later life I’ve often pondered that my mother’s comment was almost Biblical recalling, in a way, how Eve “weakened”, gave in to temptation, and ate the apple and then in turn weakened Adam.  So sin, and all that went with it, was born......or so the Bible warned us, and so, too, did my mother so often warn me!

There were, however, other things that I can remember.  When I played with my friends in our back yard it was not unusual to smell baking waft from Ma Woodacre’s kitchen and over the dividing wall and we kids would stand, like the "Bisto kids" in the Bisto advert sniffing the delicious smells of cooking, soaking up the aroma! On other occasions – especially when we squashed on my front door step or, if raining, huddled in our tiny vestibule swapping our picture cards, talking football or pondering the world into which were growing up, the sound of a piano playing could sometimes be faintly heard coming from number 16 – and if you were lucky the sound of a voice singing in accompaniment.  I assumed then – and still do today – that these were hymns, and although a child and no expert, even to my young ears both the playing and the singing seemed very professional. If Ma Woodacre was such a dreadful person, I often reasoned, how come she had such a wonderful voice (which I now know was probably a contralto) and more important, how come she baked such nice smelling cakes!

In short, it was all very strange – and as I have grown older I’ve often pondered how we treat and think of those who simply don’t fit in with our preconceptions and perception of what is acceptable and “normal”. It’s a very small step, it seems to me, between someone being labelled a bit odd, a bit of an eccentric and in today’s world being labelled a “nutter”, a “pervert” or a “scrounger”. Ma Woodacre and her son harmed no-one it seemed to me both then and now – they simply didn’t quite fit in with the traditions, the expectations and indeed the prejudices of the street - and as such were seen as not acceptable, suspicious; as things - not fellow human beings - "others" to be feared and excluded.

To me (and my friends), however, the Woodacre’s were largely an irrelevance. Excluded, watched with suspicion and often vilified by our parents, to us to us kids they were never really part of our world. Unlike Old Mother Nixon who lived alone and opposite or Mr Abbott who thought he was a cut above the rest of us, neither Ma Woodacre or Gordon ever came out to complain when we kids played football in the street – a thing we did endlessly. We only had to emerge from our homes with a football and Old Mother Nixon would be at her front door waving her walking stick before we had even put down our coats as goalposts or a ball had been kicked. “Clear off you little b*****s go an ‘brek’ some b****r else’s winders” she would shout in a voice so loud it seemed impossible to come from such a small frame! We, of course, laughed and ignored her but whatever we did outside number 16 the Woodacre’s front door remained firmly closed, its peeling paintwork and grubby doorstep like the entrance to some ancient forbidding and forbidden dungeon............................ until, that is, one hot summer’s day in 1955.

The long, hot and very dry summer of 1955 still stands in the record books as one of the UK’s great heat waves. I still remember those school holidays endlessly playing cricket against the doors of newsagent Joe Unsworth’s row of lock up garages, swimming in the outdoor swimming pool on Waverley Park and making tents out of my dad’s old army blankets in our little back yard and in the process ruining the blankets by hammering six inch nails from my dad’s shed through the blankets and into the gaps between the flags to secure the blankets to the ground! And, on one of those long hot days something new happened in Caroline Street: Ma Woodacre’s front door was left ajar! But not only that, hanging in the tiny vestibule, visible to the outside world, was a gloriously gilded cage – which to our young eyes looked like gold! – and perched in the cage was a brilliantly coloured parrot. Behind the cage one could see into the Woodacre’s front room – a place of mystery never seen before. My great pal Nebber (his real name was Tony but everyone called him Nebber because he often wore a flat cap with a “neb” – a peak – on it) and I stood mesmerised by both the bird and what lay behind it – it was to us like the entry to some Aladdin’s cave.

 As we stood there, the parrot perched and imperious, tipped its head to the side to watch us and Nebber stuck his finger through the bars and whispered “Pretty Polly”. The bird shuffled on its perch and bobbed its head. We both began to chorus “Pretty Polly” but the bird remained silent and then as our two voices rose in crescendo there emerged from Aladdin’s Cave the huge flowery form of Ma Woodacre. “His name is Peter” she said. Silence, we unsure what to do or say; part of me said “Run, it’s Ma Woodacre” but another part of me wanted to know more.  Nebber, a year younger than me, but never backward in coming forwards,  said “Does he talk Mrs?”. Mrs Woodacre smiled and put her face near to the cage and chirped “Peter, Peter” – and the parrot squawked back “Peter, Peter”.  This was a signal, for mayhem as Nebber and me chirruped “Peter, Peter, Peter.........!” The parrot sat, head to one side, silent, unmoved by our pleas but suddenly,  the hot afternoon summer air of Caroline Street was split with a thousand questions:

“Can he say anything else Mrs?”

“Didn’t know you had a parrot Ma”.

“Can he fly”

“Is he new?”

“Can I stroke him?”

“How old is he?”

Ma Woodacre smiled again and disappeared into the dungeon which was in semi darkness, the curtains being drawn to keep out the sun’s glare and presumably to keep the place cool in the heat wave. We stood gazing at the parrot and stuck our fingers through the bars; the bird remained impassive. Moments later the Ma returned with a slice of apple in her hand. She pushed the apple in between the bars of the cage and Peter the parrot leapt into action scuttling along his perch and pecking away at the tasty morsel – and as he did so the cage swayed back and forth on the chain which was attached to a huge hook in the ceiling of the vestibule. The apple having disappeared, Ma Woodacre produced another small piece and gave it to Nebber “Be careful” she said, “Don’t frit him”. Nebber pushed the piece of apple through the wires and the bird leapt onto the wires, its claws wrapping themselves around them and its body pressed against them as it pecked at the apple which Nebber was holding. As the bird pecked at the apple Nebber stroked its feathered breast which was pressed against the wires of the cage. That, of course was a signal for me to have a go – and Ma Woodacre allowed both of us to hold a small slice of fruit up for the bird while Peter, presumably thought he was in some kind of parrot heaven – the centre of attention and gorging himself in the afternoon sunshine of Caroline Street recalling, perhaps, primeval memories of his ancient ancestors who had pecked at fruit in the sunshine of luscious Caribbean Islands or exotic African shores. And while he gorged, we two townie kids, offspring of Clement Attlee’s “New Jerusalem”, born into the mean streets of Blake’s “Dark satanic mills” stood transfixed and lost for words at this enchanting discovery behind the Woodacre’s peeling front door.

As the summer temperature rocketed, as it seemed to do every day, Peter was hung out to enjoy the sun and Nebber and me fed him – usually from tit bits supplied by Ma Woodacre but, often too with the contents of our own pockets – bits of chocolate, licks of ice lollies, biscuits and crusts from our own larders. The poor bird must have longed for some peace and quiet from the faces pressed to his cage or the finger tips poked into his gilded home. He learned to squawk  back at us “Peter, Peter, Peter” and today,  as I think back,  I wonder if, in the quiet of Ma Woodacre’s front parlour he pondered the new vocabulary he might have heard from us kids as he gazed out on the narrow sunlit street: “Owzat!”, “Goal!”, “LBW”, “Foul” or “Clear off you little b*****s go an ‘brek’ some b****r else’s winders”!

Through it all Gordon Woodacre came and went, rarely, if ever acknowledging us kids as we took every opportunity of gaining Peter the parrot’s attention. Ma Woodacre, however was different. We still only rarely saw her go shopping and never enter into the social life of the street. Her front door remained closed grimy as always except for those long hot afternoons when some fresh air was allowed to ventilate her tiny house via the open door. Our daily visits to see the parrot developed into invites into her front room – but never further. And what a magical world it seemed to us. The tiny room – a reflection of my own front room next door - was filled with huge, heavy dark furniture and two ancient but, even to my eyes, well cared for chairs and a small settee and in the alcove an ornate and ancient piano complete with candle sticks. On the heavily patterned wallpaper hung ancient paintings and sepia photographs depicting long gone men with moustaches and side whiskers and women in long dresses and bonnets all looking rather grim and surrounded by groups of well scrubbed serious looking children all in their Sunday best. The curtains and lamp shades all seemed to have tassels and an old iron range - black and highly polished – filled the chimney breast. The room was so full that there seemed no room to move around and this was made worse by Ma Woodacre – not a small woman but whose faded, heavily floral patterned frocks and wrap around pinny, so much favoured by Lancashire women of that generation, seemed to make her into some kind of mobile barrage balloon that drifted between the tightly packed furniture, the antimacassars and the pot plants that covered the polished furniture’s surfaces. I can remember wondering about the mismatch between the house’s inside and its outside. Outside was grimy, the paintwork peeling and it oozed a general lack of care and maintenance, no donkey stoned scrubbed step to relieve the dilapidated frontage. In many respects all the houses in the streets looked in need of tender loving care – they were all, I assume, rented like ours and in those post war days DIY or landlords keeping their property in good repair was not the highest of priorities. But externally number 16 was several steps down the ladder so far as any good housekeeping certificate was concerned. Inside, however, it was different; although old fashioned I recognised that it was well cared for and clearly a source of pride. Although full to capacity with “stuff” it was spotlessly clean,  oil cloth shining and surfaces polished – the only exception to that being a shelf in the other chimney breast alcove which was scattered with bird seed – obviously Peter the Parrot’s place of residence when his cage was not hanging in the afternoon sun of the vestibule. And, into this Aladdin’s Cave would sweep Ma Woodacre  carrying mugs and the stoneware jug that I had seen her with on her nightly trip to the off licence. She would fill our mugs with sparkling lemonade or dandelion and burdock and then appear with a plate of biscuits which Nebber and I would soon demolish.

Between feeding Peter the parrot and occasionally being allowed to ease our hands through the open cage door to stroke his head we slowly, visit by visit, piece by piece, learned that Ma Woodacre had always lived in the house – she had been born there almost 70 years before. Her father, she told us, had owned the house, so it was, unlike ours, not rented - a thing which I only later realised might have explained why she seemed to the neighbours to always have a bit of money to live what my mother called her "life of Riley". Unlike them she didn't have to pay any rent. Her husband, Harold, had died in the 1917 hell of Passchendaele, a year or two after they had married half way through the Great War – Gordon was the son he never saw. Harold, she told us, had no grave, his body had never been found in Passchendaele’s mud and he was commemorated, she said, at the war memorial there. She had never visited the memorial in Belgium, perhaps she couldn’t afford it, and in those days, I suppose, Belgium was a world away for a working class widowed woman with a young child. She did, however, each year, on his birthday, on the anniversary of his death and on Armistice Day visit the war memorial in Preston’s cemetery where, she said, his name was listed. Preston’s cemetery in New Hall Lane is only a 10 minute walk from Caroline Street – my own grandparents, great grandparents, and many aunts and uncles are buried there.   

One day she took down a faded photograph from the piano and showed it to us; a young, pale faced, woman in a white dress, holding a small bouquet and standing beside a uniformed man. The young, clean shaven man, hair smoothed down in the fashion of the day, was a soldier, standing upright, almost to attention, proud in his smartly done up uniform with its shining buttons, his lower legs encased in what I knew were the puttees worn by soldiers in the Great War, his boots shining brightly. On his arm one could see two stripes denoting that he was a corporal and under that arm he held his cap and the woman linked her arm through his other arm; they stood straight, upright, looking ahead as if to the future and what it held for them. This was their wedding day; and the wrinkled matronly woman in front of us in her flowered pinny was that same person who had stood, a lifetime ago, for this posed photograph: slim, pretty, demure, the hint of a smile on her face at the side of her brave soldier boy, Harold, Gordon’s father who had left his pretty young wife to go off to war, never to return. As Nebber and I looked we both knew that  we did not have the words to express what should be said. We were just two scruffy back street kids and could say nothing  appropriate to the old woman, so we just mumbled embarrassed pleasantries while Ma Woodacre breathed on the glass of the photo and wiped it with her sleeve to remove our sticky finger prints, and then replaced it on the top of the piano. We also learned that Ma Woodacre was teetotal and always had been so. Brought up a strict Methodist she had never, she told us, “took a drop”. Nebber, never one to hold back, and having heard that waded in “Does Gordon drink all the beer you get at Mrs Knowles’ every night then, everybody sez he’s a drunkard?” The woman smiled and replied “Nay lad, he’s teetotal as well – he might go into yon pubs but he doesn’t drink, it’d be more than his life’s worth, I can tell thee! It’s only lemonade and dandelion and burdock that I bring back from Kitty Knowles’ corner shop. Folk can think what they like about me and our Gordon, it’s up to them” And we sat, lips wet and sweet with the sugar from the lemonade or dandelion and burdock, biscuit crumbs scattered at our feet, perplexed at this woman who was not what we thought at all. 

She would ask us about ourselves, what our dads did for a living, where our mothers worked, what we learned at school, what we were going to do when we grew up. She herself had worked in the cotton mills like my mother and aunties but as a cotton spinner (my mother and aunties were weavers) at the local spinning mill, Paul Catterall’s, just around the corner from Caroline Street.  Harold, before going off to war, had been a tackler at the same mill; my uncle Joe was a tackler, one of the men that kept the looms and the spinning machines running.

While thinking about this writing I found a wonderful old photograph showing a decorative float made by the Paul Catterall mill for the 1922 Preston Guild processions. Preston has had Guild celebrations since in 1179 when King Henry II awarded Preston its first royal charter. At the Guild all the local companies, churches, clubs, societies, brass bands, etc. parade and show their “wares”; there is a fairground, great pageants, schools put on displays. The whole thing lasts for 2 weeks once every 20 years. Each and every day is filled with parades, processions and civic events. As I looked at the old photograph of the Paul Catterall 1922 Guild float I realised that Ma Woodacre could easily have been on this photograph standing in front of the bobbins of cotton thread piled high to make a pyramid. Certainly, I guess if she were still alive today she would be able to point to the people in the photograph and recognise each and every one. All part of life’s rich tapestry, but times change, the world moves on. When the photograph was taken in 1922 Preston had 60 cotton weaving and spinning mills; the Preston skyline then like a Lowry painting, filled with tall factory chimneys reaching, it seemed to us kids, up to the clouds. Each factory chimney and thousands of house chimneys pouring forth smoke and the narrow Preston streets filled with Lowry type figures making their way to and from “t’mill”. According to my internet search the Paul Catterall mill was producing over 42000 bobbins of cotton thread a day in 1922 to feed the looms in Lancashire's great weaving mills like Horrockses where my mother and aunties worked as weavers; it was a time when, as my Auntie Edna frequently reminded me as a child, “England’s bread hung by Lancashire’s thread!

 In the 1952 Guild (there was no Guild celebration in 1942 because of the war) I had been dressed in tin foil as one of hundreds of school boy St Georges, each carrying tin foil swords and shields and following a great exotically painted (and not very fierce looking) dragon through Preston’s town centre, the pavements full of cheering, flag waving Prestonians who had been there since early morning to get a good view!  In that same 1952 Guild my dad had driven his green lorry, brightly polished with tyres painted white and on the back of his lorry was the huge fuselage of the Canberra bomber which was made by his company, English Electric, in Preston; the UK was still, in those days, a great industrial manufacturing nation and had risen from the ashes of war – Clement Attlee’s “New Jerusalem” had arrived.

And so that long hot summer slowly drew to a close and we returned to school - Nebber to St Joseph's Catholic School and me to St Matthew's C of E School. As the August heat descended into early Autumn’s chill Peter the parrot returned to his shelf in the alcove of Ma Woodacre’s front room and the paint peeling front door remained shut.  Only Gordon emerging, furtive as always scuttling down the street, eyes darting this way and that – a man on a mission. Ma Woodacre continued to keep herself to herself and the sharp tongues of Caroline Street continued to wag. Nebber and I rarely spoke of our talks with Ma Woodacre – the world moved on and we grew up. I don’t know about Nebber but I never told my mum or dad of our visits into Ma Woodacre’s front room, or of the biscuits and the drinks of lemonade and dandelion and burdock. So strongly did my mother hold her views (as indeed did other women of the street) that, as with many things in my childhood, I felt then (and still today) that it was not worth the potential “pain” to open the wound. My mother was not a woman to be trifled with and to suggest to her that Ma Woodacre was really quite a nice, kind old lady, with a lovely parrot and that she was not a drunkard but gave us mugs of pop and biscuits would, I fear, have been too much; it would, to coin a phrase, have all ended in tears - mine. It was one of those things about which the less said, the better – like my trips to swim in the River Ribble with my school pals Basil Laycock and Bill Rigby, or the games of football and cricket that I enjoyed with Nebber and Gary and their Catholic friends in the garden of St Joseph’s  the local Roman Catholic Church and which were organised by the young priests in the seminary of the Church.  The Roman Catholic religion was, to my mother, just one step away from Satanism so deep was her dislike of “them damn Papists”. They were, according to my mother, just like the Irish who she hated with equal measure and who, she often told me, “would overrun us all”. In all these things, and others, as a child and a teenager (and later adult) I felt it wiser to say nothing. I never understood my mother’s venom, outlook on life and what we might now call prejudice, so while she laboured at her looms in Horrockses’ cotton mill I felt it wiser to find out more about the world in my own way and keep my thoughts to myself.  The alternative was too painful to contemplate. I loved my mother dearly, and she too loved me with a fierce and overwhelming passion, but I knew then, and did so until the day that she died, that when her views were challenged her venom, intolerance and prejudice could know no bounds - and woe betide anyone who got in the way or crossed her.

As I grew into my teenage years my world widened away from the street but a few months after we first met Peter the parrot, Caroline Street found more evidence of the “goings on” at number 16 to confirm their suspicions and prejudices. Out of the blue a young woman began entering and leaving the house. The word on the street was that her name was Eva and that she was “Gordon Woodacre’s fancy woman”. How this was known I have no idea but it wasn’t long before she was cast as some latter day Jezebel – and openly referred to as “the scrubber” or “Gordon Woodacre’s tart”. This, of course, was the 1950s when a different moral and social framework operated but when it became obvious that Eva had moved in and was living at number 16 the gossip went into overdrive and the outrage became tangible. My mother felt that as this scandalous coven lived next door to us we – and especially I – were in danger of being forever “tarred with the same brush”.  It wasn’t long before a number of the women of the street – Mrs Dean, Mrs Graveson, Mrs Grimshaw, Mrs Abbott and my mother (and probably others too) took it upon themselves to complain to the local constabulary about the “goings on” at the Woodacre’s. A letter was composed by the women sitting around our little back kitchen table, my mother, who wrote well, being the scribe. The police acknowledged the letter and said that they noted the complaint but to my mother’s chagrin, did nothing. And I wondered. I was now old enough to understand the subtext and could not prevent myself asking the question “Is there another side to this story?” – but, of course, I never voiced my concern. We would never know, however, because after a month or two Eva moved out never to be seen again, the world moved on, and the street returned to its quiet hypocrisies. 

Ma Woodacre was not what it seemed on the outside and she made no effort to correct that. The women of the street therefore, just assumed the worst, her perceived dissolute life style, her seeming lack of regular income, her lack of pride in her house and her refusal to abide by the expectations of the street condemning her. To us kids, however, - she was just old lady who, for whatever reason, just wanted to live her life behind her closed and grimy front door, an old woman who seemed to live a bit of a strange life. Maybe today we might say she was a bit of a Bohemian or she did her own thing. And, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say now that a decade later, by 1966, the Beatles, were doing their own thing and living the Bohemian lifestyle of Sergeant Pepper. The summer of flower power and free love was mainstream. By then, maybe, Ma Woodacre would have been more easily accepted – and, of course, by then Gordon may well have had to get  “proper job”  because “off course betting” was  by then legal – the days of the bookie’s runner were over! And as for the evil Eva the potential corruptor of teenage boys, her imagined or real indiscretions would have looked small beer, almost saintly, when compared with the Profumo Affair scandals and lifestyles of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies the unseemly and lascivious details of which filled the front pages of my mother’s 1960’s Daily Mirror,  Sunday Express and News of the World and which she devoured daily with an indecent gusto. Times had moved on, and so had I; by 1965 I had left Preston and was living in Nottingham and my mother and dad had left Caroline Street to live in a small village 10 miles away from Preston. I never saw or heard of Ma Woodacre again.

Nebber and I, I think, realised at the time that Ma Woodacre wasn’t odd, mad or bad – and I certainly knew that she wasn’t how my mother painted her. She was just an old lady who wanted to live in the only world that she had perhaps ever known – the world that she had made for herself and her son after the tragic loss of her husband. Of course, at that age we didn’t think of her in those terms, to us she was just an old woman who gave us biscuits, lemonade to drink and had a wonderful pet; we were innocents, and  looked no deeper than that innocence, we had no agendas. But today, in our world which has lost so much of that innocence, I often wonder if we have also lost so much else; we look for danger around every corner, believe that the world is full of people who would cheat us or harm us or our children, we are habitually cynical about those in power and words like paedophile, pervert, benefits cheat, scrounger fall easily from many lips and are the common currency of social media and our tabloid press. Just as it did in Caroline Street in 1955, difference still promotes alienation and too often hatred. Have we really come very far? Five minutes spent on social media or listening to some of our own leading politicians, and even the President of the United States soon convinces me that although we have made huge strides in our clever technology, our lack of common humanity, tolerance and love for our fellow man hasn’t changed much and has, maybe, even deteriorated further.

And Ma Woodacre? – just and eccentric, an odd ball, or a dissolute old woman, with no pride in her house, “common as muck”, a scrounger living off her drunken son’s immoral earnings as the women of Caroline Street painted her...... who knows? Maybe, her priorities were different; maybe the sepia photographs in her front room told a story of a hard or tragic life,  maybe the old furniture that had been part of her life since she had been born was a bit of security for her.  Maybe she had a war pension from her dead husband Harold and just wanted to live with her memories, maybe she had secrets that she wished to keep close to her, maybe there were aspects of her life (and her son) that she did not wish to share or to be the common gossip of the street. Whatever, the social mores of the time didn’t have an algorithm to take account of all that. For whatever reason, Ma Woodacre didn’t fit the mould or the expectations of the others in the street and she suffered for it. She lived her life on her terms but was a victim of that and of her circumstances, of the zeitgeist of the age, and the social expectations and prejudices of the place. 

But, there is a postscript to all this, and a wonderful postscript it is.  

As I remembered those far off days and wrote this piece I began to wonder. Was there more to discover, was there something more to find out and which might shed a light? There was, and with the marvels of modern technology it was both very easy and ultimately profoundly humbling to roll back the years. With a few clicks of my computer mouse I “found” Ma Woodacre’s long dead husband Harold. His name is recorded in the Portland Stone of the huge Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing in Belgium. It is also recorded in the Books of Memorial there and digitally available from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Together with 33782 other UK soldiers and 1200 men from New Zealand who lost their lives in the hell and mud of the Battles of Ypres/Passchendaele and have no known grave; Harold's details are recorded for all to see and his details record a part of Ma Woodacre’s life that she didn’t tell us in those long gone summer days.


Harold’s military details told me that had been promoted since the ancient photograph on Ma Woodacre’s front room of him and his young bride on their wedding day; he had died a sergeant with three stripes on his arm. And wonderfully and yet tragically he was awarded the Military Medal, his gallantry mentioned in Despatches. In short, Ma Woodacre’s Harold was not just a soldier or even just a dead soldier. He was a hero, a gallant warrior that his King and his nation had saluted and acknowledged for his bravery by awarding him one of the nation’s highest and greatest awards for bravery in action. The Military Medal, established in 1916, is awarded to Non-Commissioned Officers for "acts of gallantry and devotion to duty under fire". Ma Woodacre chose never to tell us kids that – how Nebber and I would have been impressed! Surely, we would have asked to see the medal; but no, she kept it to herself, something, perhaps, precious to her alone, something she wished to keep close, something taken from a drawer and looked at on his birthday or on their wedding anniversary perhaps. In a harsh world was this her little bit of sustenance as she grew older? How strange and unfathomable is the human condition. I wonder if the gossips of Caroline Street ever knew of this? And if they had, would it have made their views any less harsh? Would Ma Woodacre have been forgiven for not donkey stoning her front door step or for enjoying her nightly glass of lemonade or dandelion and burdock? Would Gordon, the son of a hero who had never seen his gallant father, have been viewed a little more kindly – respectfully even, for surely he deserved that as the son of a hero?  And his mother, the widowed wife of a hero; would she have been extended the friendship and graciousness that she was undeniably due? Would the tongues have wagged a little less? Would Ma Woodacre have been forgiven her perceived housekeeping sins?  I wonder, I wonder; or is the reality of mankind such that, as my philosophical mainstay and mentor,  the great ethical philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in 1784, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."  

Harold Woodacre’s entry in the Tyne Cot War Memorial List needs no explanation. Scanned above is the entry in the War Graves Memorial Book. The words say it all. Just a very few words recording the life and death of an ordinary, uneducated Preston mill worker who became a hero, and in the heat of one of the most terrible battles in the history of the world was obliterated. The few words do not tell us that he left a wife and son who crossed my childhood path many years later. Nor do they tell how much they influenced me as I grew up and how they helped  form what I now believe in as an eighty year old. Now, a century after the dreadful events of the Great War and the Battles of Ypres and Passchendaele when Harold Woodacre died so gallantly for his country, his young family and, indeed, his neighbours I am grateful for those summer afternoons in Ma Woodacre’s parlour sipping dandelion and burdock with Nebber - my great childhood pal, of whom I have such good memories. It is also , I believe, a sad and terrible, indictment upon mankind and upon Harold's widowed wife's neighbours that those same Caroline Street neighbours for whom he had died, in later years vilified his wife and son.

We two kids had been privileged in that long hot summer to be invited into Ma Woodacre’s world for just for a few minutes every few days. Why she opened up to us we would never know but because we had that opportunity, and with the passing of time, those long gone minutes feeding Peter the parrot, drinking dandelion and burdock and peeping into the world of this old woman have given me more than just a good memory; I also learned something about people, and of the world that I was growing up into. When, ten years after these events took place, as a trainee teacher at college in Nottingham I first read Harper Lee’s powerful and moving tale of racial prejudice and hate in “To kill a Mockingbird” the mighty words of lawyer Atticus Finch leapt off the page at me. I can still remember  thinking then of Ma Woodacre, of her parrot and of dandelion and burdock. "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it…." Finch tells his young daughter Scout as he strives to explain to her the nature and the roots of empathy. In today's world of racial tensions, populist hate filled rhetoric about refugees and asylum seekers, the vilification of people of other faiths or orientation, or “others” who simply do not fit in with society’s perception of what is “normal”, empathy I  believe, is in short supply. Indeed, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, earlier this year told us that "the biggest weakness of the western world was empathy" . The good housewives of  Caroline Street, Preston in 1955 certainly would not have heeded Finch's advice; none had a mind to "climb into Ma Woodacre's skin" and see her world, and know of what had gone before to make it so. Had they taken this leap into the unknown then they might have found themselves and their prejudices wanting - and I don't think anyone of them would have liked what they saw in themselves. Perhaps that is why, still today, prejudice remains with us, that to acknowledge it is to expose our own shortcomings and make us aware of our most unpleasant and unworthy innermost aspects.