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A small room in a tiny terraced house with uneven floors flagged with slabs of natural stone. A bare light bulb, such luxury when most had cold noisy gas, lighting a dark pegged rug in front of a shabby but polished brass fender and fireguard with a shiny brass top rail. The black cast iron fire place with a built in water heater and oven, surmounted by a metal mantelpiece with a photo of ‘our Eunice’, mum’s sister who died of a lung disease the year I was born. A cheap plaster puppy won on the Moor Lane New Year fairground stood alongside the photo trapping some item of clothing hung to dry.

The wooden clothes airer, attached by pulleys and rope to the ceiling and usually in use, directly over the rug and the two upholstered chairs at either end of it made a cosy shrine or grotto of the area round the fire. Dad almost made it a funeral pyre when he set the clothes on the airer on fire whilst carelessly lighting his pipe.

The fire itself like an altar where everyone gathered, needed to be constantly tended and cosseted to get the maximum heat from the poor quality dirty coal. A fireclay brick or two wedged into the hearth reduced the volume of the fire for economy but didn’t help the draught needed to keep it glowing brightly. The flickering flames and the hissing of the gases as they were forced out of the small cobs were the entertainment of many a winter evening. The gases, soot and carbon smuts, which squirted out of these tiny volcanoes, filled the room, the air, our clothes and lungs and caused the constant battle for cleanliness. Nonetheless, it was at these polluting altars that we all worshipped.
The back yard about twenty feet long was almost filled in my memory with a brick and concrete air raid shelter which I can never remember using for its intended purpose. The lavatory was at the end of the yard by the back gate. Surprisingly it flushed but never had the luxury of toilet paper. Torn up newspapers with string through the corner was the norm. Round the toilet was an ash pit which was emptied through a small door in the back street. The walls of the yard were slabs of stone wedged into the ground. I remember climbing up these cliff faces once when one collapsed onto me. How my crushed little finger repaired itself is a miracle but it did, as did the hole in my thigh. As it repaired I scratched at it and my father coming to see why I cried in the night was covered in a spray of fine blood spots. My mother thought he had measles.

The George Street house was old, probably just under a hundred years since the cotton mill owners had had it and its neighbours rushed up to house the inflow of cotton operatives and factory hands they needed. Walkers’ tannery had been built in the next street in the intervening years and most residents worked in the mill or in the tannery. There seemed to be very little general maintenance during the war and everywhere was dingy apart from the layer of dirt that overlaid my world, from the factory and house chimneys.

Clothes hung out on the back street washing lines were often brought in and out to let the coal men through, but often were dirtier from the chimney smuts than they were when they went out.

There was little traffic and much of what there was horse drawn. The milkman and the green grocer had horse drawn carts as had the chap selling donkey stones and paraffin. Petrol rationing meant there was little recreational driving and the numbers of people owning cars did not include any of my neighbours. There were a few noisy little lorries. There were big wagons carrying cotton bales to the mills from the enormous railway warehouses on Manchester Road and dripping hides from the fellmongers to the tannery. Rag and bone men and peddlers occasionally had a skinny underfed horse but most pushed handcarts as did the knife and scissors grinders shouting their wares and trades round the poor streets. One sharpener however had a cycle set up that, by a clever arrangement of straps, drove a grinding wheel from the pedals.

My father, a tannery worker, was a conscientious Air Raid Warden and in the evenings and weekends and on some nights he patrolled the streets and factories.
Grand-dad who also worked at the tannery lived with Grandma on the next street. Grant Street really was in the shade of the tannery and Grandma who came from a farming village in Lincolnshire must have felt trapped by that tannery. She had a sparsely furnished house full of stray cats, and an old spaniel called Digo. I distinctly remember her sending Digo to fetch his owner from the allotment on Manchester Road as dinner was ready She never seemed particularly welcoming as did the relatives in Lincolnshire when I eventually met them. This was probably a result of her being ill with cancer for a long time and she didn’t survive the war. She took me to see Bambi at the Regal cinema when it was first released. We had a good cry together when Bambi’s mother was killed. I still think of her when I hear ‘Love is a song that never ends.’

Grand-dad moved in with us until he died in the 1950s. He was a good man and taught himself to make good leather footballs and repair shoes which is what he was doing when his heart packed up. The footballs made me a popular playmate with my peers. ‘It’s my ball I’ll pick the teams.’

He used to sing Music Hall songs and tell of his days near the Bermondsey tannery in London where he was born. Tom Farris was always a keen footballer and when he was too old to play managed some very good local teams in the Sunday leagues. It was a joy to see him in an old photo in the Evening News standing proudly by his league winning team. He once made me a plywood fort for Christmas. It was wonderful. I couldn’t believe it was for me. Toys were so few and hard to come by and here I was with a replica fort. He once bought me a fountain pen with a gold nib when I ‘passed my scholarship’. I rewarded him by loosing it. I’ve never forgiven myself. I searched the ‘rec’, Musgraves’ recreation grounds, for hours. I still have an odd feeling on seeing beautiful pens.

My parents especially my mother used to talk about ‘before the war’ which was a phrase used repeatedly by all. She told me of blue skies and open moorlands walking with friends and relatives. She told me of a popular song I knew called Stormy Weather which came out at a time when the weather was perfect and the sun shone and shone and shone. My mum and dad were in the Clarion cycling club which was politically affiliated to the Labour party and the long rides they went on. The Clarion was my father’s life in his teens and early twenties. His cycling stories were a joy to listen to. Such comradeship! The sing songs and get togethers he enjoyed sound wonderful even today.

I looked round at the dirty streets and back yards and tried to picture those rolling hills and the long continuous summer ‘before the war’, had it been anyone other than my mother that told me of them I wouldn’t have believed it. Winter nights were dreadful and the fogs in those days were unbelievable. Those were smelly, choking, persistent real fogs.

Vehicles could only show the minimum of lights. There was no street lighting. All lights from shops, factories and housing was masked and hidden. You could buy cardboard disks with a safety pin on the back that were dipped in luminous paint. At least you could see these little blobs of light moving in the blackness. Despite the dark I cannot remember seeing the stars as one should have been able to. Of course I was probably tucked up in bed most of the time. There was so much haze and murk in the atmosphere that the heavens were hidden. Even on sunny days there was a haze in the air and shadows were indistinct.

The June holidays when the town closed down were by repute the only time you could see across town. I know it as a fact from the 1950s looking out across Bolton from the lofty Scout road at the top of Smithills. All those mill chimneys quiescent! The sound of larks filled my conscientiousness. Did the summer holidays happen during the war? I never had a holiday apart from the breaks from school.

We were taught the fundamentals of the town’s main trade at school but I consider myself fortunate not to have been forced to follow my mother and her family into t’mill. She was very skilled at her job and could easily get employment. The only time she could work was in the evenings when dad could take over at home. I remember taking a message to her in the mill at the bottom of the street. The atmosphere was hot, dry and dusty. I couldn’t hear myself speak but my mother, having worked from 13 years old, in that environment had no problem and was amused to see me in her work place. She said later that I looked as if I had stumbled onto another planet. I had often been near the entrances when the buzzer had sounded for the end of the working day and the mill workers had poured out like ants from a disturbed nest. They were covered in fluff and dust from the cotton and there was the all pervading smell of the cotton and the hot oil of the machines. A smell that did stay with me was that of a cotton mill fire on Nelson Street during the war. The floors of the mill would be saturated with oil from the cotton and the machines and the fire was unstoppable.

A small corner shop facing the burned out mill was the source of a major joy for me. Occasionally they would get a supply of crisps in tin boxes. Three half pence would buy a bag of magic. They seemed to represent those pre-war summer days. There was no chocolate, very few toffees and I often wondered why shops had colourful tin adverts everywhere for Cadbury’s this and Fry’s this that they never had for sale.

The slot machines that I saw attached to walls never had anything in them. My mother told me I began to walk for the reward of a piece of Cadbury’s milk chocolate. She told me this when I had no idea what it was. I felt that I had been born after some catastrophe. Everything seemed to be run down and in decline. Nothing was new. All was making do with what little there was left. I felt like England must have felt after the fall of the Roman Empire and it slipped back to the dark ages. I knew I lived in a dark age.

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