Day Forty Two

A Yorkshire childhood

I didn’t have the benefit of grandparents as a child but we lived next door to a large family, where the grandfather had been a sailor.   His wife and family had heard his seafaring anecdotes a hundred times and treated them with bored indulgence but I never tired of them.

 In most homes, the front room was kept for ‘best’.  It was regularly cleaned and polished but used on very few occasions. 

Families ate in the back room where the huge black kitchen range kept everything warm and cosy and where all the cooking took place.

The family gathered round the table for each meal and it was in this room, often to the sound of the Billy Cotton Band show, that Dad had his doze by the fire after Sunday dinner.  It was also  where we all relaxed in the evening, listening to the wireless or playing snakes and ladders. 

 In fact, it was where we did most of our living. Not suprising then that we called it a Living Room.

Pop and Nana; I never knew them by any other names;  lived in the front room of the terrace house.  

Their bed took up one wall and was covered with a bright quilt hand sewn by Nana.  There was a glass-doored china cabinet filled with beautiful ornaments and figurines, which on special occasions and under strict supervision, I could take out and hold.  

On the hearth, the most amazing thing of all - a brass alligator.

Alligator nut cracker

 I spent a lot of time with Nana and Pop, sitting on Nana’s knee as she read a magazine, commenting sarcastically on the articles and pictures of film stars. ‘Just look at that flighty piece, showing all she’s got.  I wonder if ‘er mother knaws she wears dresses like that?’ 

But best of all, I loved to sit on a small upholstered buffett by Pop’s knee, listening to his stories. 

First he would fill his pipe, puff on it until it was well alight and clouds of smoke filled the air, then he'd wink at me. ‘Is ta ready fer a story then?’  

   Of course I was.

‘When I were in India,’ he’d begin and I was immediately transported from the back streets of Bradford to some exotic city where the aroma of spices filled the air.

‘We were watching this magician who reckoned he could mek fowk disappear. Well, me and me mates stood there and this bloke played a whistle,  an’ a rope came up off’t ground and started going up and up…’

‘Was someone pulling it, Pop?’

‘Nay lass, it were going up all by itssen, like a snake.’  Here, his hand wove upwards into the air, ‘then this little lad, dressed in nowt but ‘is ippins started to climb up it.’ 

 (ippins = nappy)

 ‘But how could he do that, if no one was holding the rope?’

‘Nah, that’s where’t magic comes in, it’s called the Indian Rope Trick.  Anyroad, as we were watching all this, a monkey, no bigger than one o’ your dollies, were running abaht. He were wearing a little red weskit and one of them hats,’ he turned to Nana, ‘what they called, Mother?’

‘A fez’, Nana replied, not looking up from her knitting.

‘Aye, that’s the one, a fez. It’s like a puddin’ basin.   He kept tekin it off so we could put coins in it. He’d run up us legs, hold onto us jackets and  shek this hat.’

I laughed at this, imagining a tiny monkey wearing a waistcoat a bit like Pop’s.

‘Well, when the little lad gets to’t top o’t rope, Poof! He disappears.’  Pop snapped his fingers, ‘no sign of him. We looked all ovver’t place but he’d vanished into thin air.’

‘But where did he go?’

‘Nay lass, doan’t ask me but summat else had disappeared an’ all.’

‘What, not the monkey?’

‘Aye, him  - and he’d tekken all us wallets wi ‘im!’