Although I am the youngest of five children, being five years younger than my nearest sibling meant that I often felt like an only child. Pauline was the nearest to me in age, but she clearly felt closer to Margaret who was just two years older than her. Frank and Tony had each other throughout their teenage years so I never really knew them. Since my brothers and sisters didn’t need me for company, either as a consequence of having each other, or due to my own nature, I found that I didn’t really need them either. It isn’t that we ever fell out, or didn’t get on, I just don’t remember much interaction with them during the first conscious decade of my life. From the age of 12, I was the only child in the house since by then only Tony lived at home, and his lifestyle meant that I rarely saw him. He got up after I’d left for school, came home for tea, but often went out immediately afterwards only returning after I’d gone to bed. He appeared to sleep throughout the weekend. I therefore grew up being self-sufficient and quite independent of other people. I mention these as facts, and not because I am in any way upset by the circumstances. The situation satisfactorily explains (to me at least) why I have always been content with my own company and don’t have the same memories of having siblings in the way that you may expect from someone coming from a large family. I was never conscious of being lonely, and played quite happily on my own, either outside messing around with all the stuff you would expect to find on a farm, or inside with my toys, which were mainly Matchbox cars or Lego bricks.
There was one toy that I loved playing with after picking it up at a jumble sale. My research shows that it was called Bayko and it comprised a plastic base which contained dozens of small holes in a grid pattern. Into these holes, were inserted pieces of 1/16” diameter (1.5mm) wire rod. Between each pair of wires, ‘bricks’ with convex edges could then be slotted to build a house. The bricks were very slender (1/8” thick and 3/4” square) so the walls of the resulting property looked in proportion, not blocky, like Lego. The kit also contained windows and doors which could be inserted as needed, and since these were hinged on the wire rods, they opened. Finally, a pre-formed roof section completed the building. I loved playing with this system, although I can quite understand why it is no longer sold. Would you let children play with four-inch lengths of wire rod slotted upright into a base?
Jumble sales were great! I never remember stuff being sent there – Mum must have secretly removed under-used toys over time and sent them off, but I always came home with lots of ‘new’ toys. The school always had a jumble sale in the autumn, which was a very exciting event. At a jumble sale, I could see and choose the toys I wanted rather than relying on Father Christmas (who didn’t always get it right) or later, Kay’s catalogue and a marker pen.
Another school event, usually in October, was a fancy dress evening. I never really liked these occasions, since I always remember going as a chimney sweep and I never won. My dad had a real chimney sweep’s brush, and it was easy to kit me out in old clothes and ‘black me up’. I suppose it was quite an appropriate costume at that time, since the newly released Mary Poppins film featured a chimney sweep. What I did enjoy on those evenings was being in school at night time. It was so strange being in the classrooms and it being dark outside.
Bonfire night was another popular evening. Although we had a large field, and often a bonfire, the nights I remember most were when we went to our neighbour’s farm. There we would share our fireworks and have a joint party with lots of treacle toffee and parkin. The fireworks were always a disappointment, but even today, I am rarely impressed unless it is a commercial display. I remember being frightened of what we called flip-flaps (I think the official name for them was Jumping Crackers) which were lengths of brown paper tubes filled with explosive before being tightly folded into a zig-zag shape. Once lit, the firework would explode with a loud crack and shoot several feet every few seconds. Its trajectory was completely random, and it would jump about eight times overall. Consequently, they were dangerous, especially in the dark, and were banned in the early 1970s, or more accurately, the manufacturers ‘voluntarily withdrew them from the market’. Another frightening firework (for me) was the pinwheel or Catherine wheel. At fireworks parties, I remember them falling off the pin, and then go zipping round the yard terrifying the young Bernard.
Children were able to buy bangers several weeks before bonfire night, and I remember my friend, Ernest always had some. We would experiment with them, doing all manner of things, such as floating lit ones along the canal, burying them in cowpats and setting them off in old bean cans. In some ways, this was perhaps safer than bonfire night, because there were only two of us, we only set off one firework at once, which we watched closely and it was daylight. We never came to any harm.
Ernest was my best friend at primary school and he lived in Higher Wheelton, about two miles from me and just about as far away as the school catchment would allow. Therefore, our friendship outside school didn’t really get going until we were seven or eight years old when we could ride our bikes between the houses. We often spent weekends together, riding our bikes or exploring the area around our homes on foot. We loved going down past the canal at Wheelton to play in the River Lostock, making dams and just messing about generally.
I’m on the top row, 2nd from right, Ernest middle row 2nd from right, Christopher Yates middle row 2nd from left and Geraldine front row 3rd from left.
Our desire for exploration took us on a lovely bike ride one day. We had decided that if we set off from Ernest’s house in Higher Wheelton, and took every first left turn, we must end up back where we started. (I now know that the logic is flawed, but I was only about eight at the time). We set off on our bikes, turning left out of Ernest’s drive, missing out the next left since we knew it led to Withnell Fold which was a cul-de-sac, and took the next left at the Hoghton Arms roundabout. Left, and left again saw us on Sandy Lane, and another left took us onto Marsh Lane in Brindle. Another left and we were cycling along Top o’th Lane looking across the valley to Higher Wheelton and thinking “we’ve come a long way!”. Left onto Birchin Lane, Copthurst Lane, over the canal at the Top Lock, and left onto Kenyon Lane took us to Wheelton and we were soon back home. I can’t remember how long it took us, but it was an eight mile ride.
Another memorable time was when we were trying to be helpful. Ernest lived in a bungalow with a sloping drive leading to it. One frosty day, there was ice on the drive, which we knew was dangerous, so we decided to clear it. Our knowledge of basic physics taught us that hot water clears ice quickly, so we boiled up kettles of water and poured them onto the frozen drive. Within an hour the still-frozen ground had become a perfect ski slope with a sheet of pure ice reaching down to the garage door. Our ‘helpful’ act hadn’t quite worked out as we hoped, and we got into bother for this. We were sent off to the shop to buy a bag of salt which we then spread on the drive to clear the ice in a more conventional way.
Ernest suffered a tragic childhood. His father had died in an accident when he was only five and so he and his older sister and brother were brought up by his mum and Uncle Bill. His mum’s brother, Bill Riley was a bachelor who moved in with his sister after the accident and helped support her and her family. In a parallel universe, Bill could have been my dad. I’ll explain how.
As a teenager, my mum and Bill Riley were very close friends, and were probably courting, but then Bill joined the Navy and was posted abroad towards the end of the war. Mum and Bill then corresponded by letter several times a week during the early months of 1945, but life went on as normal in the UK. Mum would often attend local dances where Bill Kellett would often be playing double bass or singing with the dance band. In May, Mum admitted that she really fancied him, and after he walked her home one night, she fell in love with the man who was to become her future husband. However, he was twelve years her senior, and her mum warned her off becoming involved with him for this reason. Such warnings went unheeded, however, and by September that year she was still begging her mum for permission to go out with him. Her parents eventually relented and mutual love developed. I am unsure just how and when Bill Riley was informed of Mum’s change of heart, but he must have been shocked and upset to discover that she was no longer ‘on the market’ when he returned to the UK. Mum and Bill Kellett got married on 29th March 1948 and remained so for over 40 years.
For whatever reason, Bill Riley never married, but after my dad died in 1989, he began visiting Mum and suggested to her that they should get together once more, albeit fifty years later than he wanted. He must have maintained his love for her all those years and never told anyone. Mum gracefully declined his later advances, but she later told me a tragic tale. Just a few days after Bill Riley had last visited her (and been rejected) Mum experienced a vivid dream in which she saw him in the corner of her bedroom. He didn’t speak, but just smiled at her before disappearing. Later that week, Mum heard the heartbreaking news that Bill had died unexpectedly during the same night she experienced the dream. Mum always maintained that Bill had come to her that night, just to say goodbye. Anyway, back to happier themes…
I always felt that living in Moss Lane, I was a long way from my friends at school, since their houses were generally on Town Lane or in Wheelton village. I remember telling my teacher once that I lived in the country, and when asked to explain, I pointed out that most people had neighbours on either side, whereas I didn’t. (We did have neighbours on one side, but they were older people without young children, so they didn’t really count). I don’t recall Mrs Snape reacting, but she must have had a quiet chuckle to herself, since she also lived in the great metropolis of Town Lane. I wonder now how envious she was of my ready access to open fields and the abundant fresh air of Moss Lane which, in my mind, was clearly denied her.
Close to my house, the canal and its locks were a great draw for the local children, and we played for hours in the grounds of a local hotel, the Howard Arms, collecting conkers (horse chestnuts), climbing trees, making dens or playing war games. We were never concerned about getting abducted by strangers, and didn’t bother about trips or falls, just taking any cuts or bumps in our stride.
Playing on the canal was routine for us, and I don’t recall that anyone ever really got hurt, nor even fell in the canal. We all knew that the canal itself wasn’t deep, no more than four feet at its deepest, but it was drummed into me that the locks were definitely dangerous. The water level could be ten feet lower when the lock was empty, and the sheer stone sides looked fearsome. I don’t recall there being ladders set into the walls (as there are now) to help you climb out if you fell in, but I suppose there must have been. I always treated the locks with respect, although that didn’t stop me from occasionally walking across the lock gates as a dare. We regularly played on the barges that were often tied up in the basins near to the locks. They were old steel barges, with nothing much in them, but they provided good entertainment for kids.
I didn’t own a watch until I was eleven, but I knew that I always had to be home before dark. However, certainly on one occasion, I remember getting into big trouble for coming home ‘late’. It was early October 1966, and the curfew was probably 6:30pm, and I strolled in at ten past seven. After getting smacked for being late I remember thinking at the time that it was grossly unfair, since I genuinely didn’t know what time it was, but since it had gone dark before I walked in, I can now see that it was a fair cop. But, as my own children will confirm, who told you life was fair?
I never had any success with fishing, although many of my friends regularly went with their dads and brothers. I never owned a rod and tackle, although I had access to a six-foot rod belonging to one of my brothers. I probably went fishing with Ernest maybe eight or ten times, and never caught anything, but then, neither did he when I was present, despite all the tales of the pike, roach and perch that he’d caught when I wasn’t there. What made me laugh were the rich boys who’d boast of having an 18-foot rod. Since the canal was only about 25 feet wide, having such a long rod was no great advantage. It might have been better to walk across to the other side and use a smaller rod. It quickly became clear that fishing wasn’t a pastime for me. I can’t bring myself to call it a sport. My dad used to laugh at the men who’d carry huge boxes of tackle to the canal and sit there for hours in the rain and cold ‘drowning worms’ as he would say. I suppose living within a quarter of a mile of the canal and having such easy access to it meant that I never really appreciated its serenity and beauty as I do now. In the late 60s, the leisure culture hadn’t taken off, and, occasional fisherman aside, we kids had the canals to ourselves without any adults telling us what we could or couldn’t do.
At secondary school, I lost contact with most of my primary school friends who then went to a different secondary school to me. I kept friends with Ernest until I was about fourteen, but not with any others. My friends all attended Holy Cross school in Chorley whereas I won a scholarship and travelled to St Mary’s College in Blackburn each day. It was not really that much further to travel (about nine miles compared to four miles), but I had to take two buses and set off at 7:40 each morning. I had a contract pass to travel on the Ribble bus from Moss Lane to Blackburn, but I had to pay for the Blackburn Corporation bus from the Boulevard to the school at the top of Shear Brow. When I started at St Mary’s in 1970, this journey cost 5d each way (2p in today’s money). Mum gave me this money and she would then claim it back as part of the scholarship at the end of each term. 20p per week doesn’t sound a lot, but I managed to save out of it by electing to walk to school most days. The Ribble bus dropped me off in town at about 8:25, and took about 20 minutes to walk just over a mile to school. A small group of us got into the habit of jumping off the bus early at King Street and walking up Montague Street and through Corporation Park, which took about the same time, but offered more opportunities for adventure. Buses home left the Boulevard soon after 4pm and 4:35, but since school didn’t finish until 4pm, I had to catch the later one, which delivered me to Moss Lane soon after 5pm, and I was home by 5:15pm. Therefore, I indirectly received spending money, ultimately funded by the County Council and also walked around 3 miles per day, part of it up rather a large hill (Shear Brow is aptly named) which was good for my fitness.
(Remember earlier, when I wrote about having difficulty in reading the word ‘fatigue’? Imagine the trouble I had walking up Montague Street each day, insisting that it should be pronounced ‘Montayg’.)
The 30-minute bus ride each way was time for chatting or messing about rather than doing homework, since I was prone to travel sickness, and so couldn’t read or write on a bus. I often felt sorry for the other paying passengers, since this was a regular service bus rather than a school special. I don’t think we were that bad, though, since the buses still had conductors who kept us in check.
I really enjoyed school dinners, the cost of which had risen to 13 shillings per week soon after I started. This became 65p in January 1971 when the country went decimal. I can still calculate in ‘old money’, but I find I struggle a bit now. I still think in feet & inches and pounds & ounces, although I can get by in metric if pushed. Metric units are not ‘natural’, however, and having to think how long is a millimetre doesn’t come easily, whilst I know my middle finger is three inches long, a good stride is one yard, and my foot is, well, a foot. I find that I weigh myself in kilograms these days but that’s only due to my poor eyesight; I can’t distinguish the small divisions denoting pounds on my analogue bathroom scale, but I can still manage to differentiate the kilogram markers. I also measure heights above sea level in metres rather than feet, simply because they are shown thus on Ordnance Survey maps. I know OS maps also have kilometre grid squares, but I refuse to use kilometres on principle. My car delivers miles per gallon, and certainly not litres per 100 kilometres. I sometimes wonder whether the country should have fully adopted SI units when we ‘went decimal’ in 1971 rather than use the hybrid system we have now. But using both systems simultaneously suits our quirky British nature, and like the ‘rules’ for our language, effectively serves to confound foreigners.
Apart from Peter Evans who caught the bus with me at Moss Lane, I was also friends with Sean Flanagan who was already on the bus when I jumped on. The bus at that time in the morning went via Abbey Village rather than the direct route through Withnell, and so other boys joined us in Brinscall and Abbey Village. Dave Coxhead was my closest school friend during my time at St. Mary’s. We were in the same class for most of our time together, whilst Sean and Peter were in different streams over the years.
Dave and I enjoyed similar interests in cycling, and, along with most schoolboys, a strong but passive interest in cars. We were both rather too interested in facts about cars, and could quote the engine size, power, top speed and wheelbase of most popular cars along with many other statistics. In my early teens, I wrote to various car manufacturers requesting brochures, and collecting these became a habit which continued for perhaps ten years. Dave and I went to the London Motor Show every year from 1975, going initially with Jackson’s Coaches from Chorley who ran a day trip to Earl’s Court. I’d return from there with dozens of brochures and leaflets which I would study carefully and file away. I still have them, and really should throw them away, but I can’t! One or two of them might be worth a pound or two by now. I have a 1973 ‘All Models’ brochure from British Leyland, which includes everything from Mini, through Austin, Morris, Triumph, Rover, Jaguar, through to small commercial vehicles, to coaches, articulated trucks and construction vehicles. The company made a huge range of vehicles, which, in retrospect, was in desperate need of rationalisation. Another brochure I am pleased to own is one for the Jaguar XJS, which was launched in 1975. I really struggled to acquire this since the salesmen on the Jaguar stand were unwilling to give expensive brochures to 16 year-olds who could clearly never afford the cars!
David and I were quite happy playing Monopoly together for hours on end. Generally, Monopoly is a game better played with a group, but in the absence of other like-minded children, we managed to create variations of the game which saw us jointly playing against the bank. We passed many a wet Saturday afternoon playing this board game, and even if David was unavailable, I could still play a version of Monopoly on my own. Even now, I find that I can quote word for word the Chance or Community Chest cards.
We also shared an interest in Matchbox cars, owning many between us. I still have mine in the loft and I could never get rid of them. Along with ‘Superfast’ track along which the cars would roll, we would spend hours racing the various cars. I say racing, but usually, we would hold ‘free-wheel contests’, where we would allow each car to roll from stationary down an incline and record the furthest point reached by each car. We would compile tables showing the distances reached, checking whether cars changed their ranking if we raised or lowered the height of the starting point. We learned a surprising amount about the relationships between friction, mass and momentum through these games. This, of course, was also something that I could enjoy when alone, and I found many hours of solitary amusement in this occupation. I also used to calculate the scale speeds of the model cars in the days before calculators, and I also worked out why model cars don’t crumple when you crash them as full size ones do. (It’s down to the relative thickness of the steel bodyshell, which is not made to the same scale as the overall car, just in case you were interested…)
Another activity that I enjoyed alone was to catalogue all my cars. I had learned about plant classifications in biology, and rather than this knowledge sparking off an interest in the natural world, I used it to create a classification guide for Matchbox cars. I still have the sheet in the loft where by asking a series of yes/no questions about any Matchbox car I owned, I could uniquely identify it. I know, I could have just turned it over and read the name on the underside, but that would have been cheating.
David and I often went cycling together, and on a couple of occasions, I was invited to join his family on holiday. In 1974 we spent a week at his relations on a farm in Bickerstaffe near Ormskirk where we found an old tandem in a barn. It was a pre-war machine and had hardly been touched for about 30 years, and we were allowed to take it. It wasn’t in great condition, but we managed to cycle home on it with ineffective brakes. We saved up to afford new wheels, a rear cassette, chain and derailleur and spent many happy hours riding round the region on it. We couldn’t get replacements for the hub brakes and so eventually we paid for them to be built into the new wheels, although they never really worked. They were just about OK when riding solo, but that wasn’t the point of a tandem. I know now just how lucky we were not to have piled it into a wall or oncoming vehicle when we were riding on the steep hills round Rivington, White Coppice and Brinscall. The tandem lay for many years in a shed at my parents until we finally gave it away probably in the early 1980s.
I made several other friends whilst at St Mary’s, but living 8 miles from Blackburn made it awkward for me to develop firm relationships outside of school hours. One boy who became a good friend in later years was Mick Sutton who came from a large family in Haslingden. I never went to see him in Haslingden because by the time we became close friends, his family had moved to Blackburn, which made it easier to keep in touch. I recall one afternoon cycling to his house in Blackburn and for something to do, we cycled over Grane Road to a mutual friend in Helmshore. The three of us then went for a walk up High Tor, a local hill, perhaps three miles distant and standing 1300 ft above sea level. I then cycled back to Blackburn and home to Whittle-le-Woods. The day’s outing was perhaps 33 miles of hilly cycling and 7 miles of walking/climbing. I would have been perhaps 13 years old at the time, and I do remember being very tired at the end. I wouldn’t have taken any water or sustenance with me, and it would have been completed on a heavy 3-speed bike wearing normal clothes. The good old days!