Moved there in February 1964 and out of there in September 1964
35 Stratton Way, Biggleswade, Beds.
My schoolroom at Biggleswade. Started making pomp-pomps but ran out of time. Dinner was served in metal canteens by table monitors at each table of six.
The flat above this shop was where we lived. When Dad wasn't running this he was away being relief manager for other Wavy Line shops. We sometimes cycled to and met him at the railway station when he was due home. I was enrolled into the cubs while living in Biggleswade.
My brother and I on the swings opposite the shop. A man used to come along about 7pm and chain the swings up so they couldn't be used/vandalised. We used to wrap the swings up ready for him to fix a lock to the entanglement.
An American family lived next door. Once, we went to tea, there, with their girls. It was strange, to me, to have crisps served with a salad.
We often walked to and from school. The Rose Lane school buildings these days have been adapted for housing with the address as Claremont Court. Google tells us it is a 17-minute walk, but obviously longer back to 35 Stratton Walk if you're smaller. [Map Link]
School double-decker buses were laid on for us. One went to Potton, the other around Biggleswade. One day a teacher misdirected everyone onto the wrong buses, and ours headed to Potton and presumably the others started going around Biggleswade until the mistake was realised and the drivers were notified.
Cattle and other livestock sales took place just off the main High Street, where Asda is now.
To the west of the town is a park and the River Ivel, but I can't recollect ever going to either while we lived there. It would have been difficult to get there as we had no car.
At the end of 1959 we moved from Royston, Barnsley, to nearby Thurlstone. We were to live in The Prospect, at the end of a terrace. It was a two-up two-down house with a pocket-sized rear garden, a coal cellar, an outside loo across the yard, and an attic ¹.
In wintertime, when the snow was 2 feet deep and you needed the loo, we had to wait until an adult had dug a path through. Either that or if it was a wee you wanted, you could use a bucket kept in the kitchen.
The coal sacks were emptied through a manhole down the side of the house. The coal cellar was where the bogey-man lived. On stormy nights, he climbed up the staircase towards the kitchen and rattled the door to scare you.
The kitchen was where the business of the house was done. The front door opened into this room. Well, let's be honest, we didn't have a back door. Mum would do the washing, ironing, cooking, and feeding the bairns. Woah betide me if I didn't eat my dinner all up. If I left any I was told it would be still there to finish at tea time. And that would be worse because by then it would be clap cold!
If we wanted hot water, Mum and Dad had to boil up water with pans and kettles. For a bath, we had a portable tin one. The water was duly heated up and poured into the tub which had been placed on the living room hearth rug in readiness. Cold water was added as required. We boys would have to wait until Dad had finished before we could get in after him to get our weekly scrub.
The cellar door was entered through the kitchen, at the foot of the staircase which ran through the middle of the house. For us kids, this staircase sometimes doubled as a playroom, but everything went away in a toybox afterwards. We had various toys including teddy bears, puppets — I had a Mr Punch of Punch and Judy fame but always referred to it as Mr Man — a golliwog, that sort of thing. We would put them on various steps on the staircase and then proceed to play at buses. We'd take it in turn to be the bus driver or bus conductor. The bus driver improvised by twiddling the wheels of a pushchair turned on its side while the other collected fares from our toy passengers.
The attic space had a further play space. There was a rocking horse in there, plus we set up a shop using play money and empty packets and boxes from the kitchen.
I had a cap-gun. Always a shame when the caps ran out.
We did have a cat. Ginger. I vaguely recall the day we moved to this house, even though I was just 3 years old. I can visualise the furniture van outside and the men bringing things in. The cat was in the van, but it escaped. Apparently, it turned up a few days later. I'm not sure what happened to it in the end; Mum has suggested it may have fallen in the Don when potentially it may have slipped off crossing stones when the water was high.
We had other pets. Hamsters and goldfish. The hamsters were fun. They got into a wheel and ran round and round for exercise. They seemed to multiply, and then they seemed to eat each other. Maybe the hamsters escaped and then wished they hadn't when they realised the cat had eyed them up. Perhaps the cat basically ate them? Certainly, with the fish, he would dip his paw into the round glass bowl and scrape them out before devouring them.
In winter, the water in the outside toilet's overhead cistern tank was liable to freeze up and wouldn't flush properly. Water in the toilet bowl also froze, and if the ice was unbreakable you couldn't do a number two until your Mum or Dad could sort it out. To wipe yourself, you could use Izal toilet paper, a slippery sort of tracing paper that took loads of sheets to get you clean. It was a poor paper to dissolve and would cause blockages in the pipes all by itself. Or, you could use torn-up pieces of newspaper that were slightly more absorbent.
Our bedroom was to the rear of the house. We had thick eiderdowns to keep us warm, and hot water bottles, of course, they went cold during the night and were kicked out of the bed. In the morning we'd wake up to see amazing ice patterns on the single-pane sash windows. You could use your fingernails to scrape the ice off the inside of the windows.
We largely played in the yard. I had a big three-wheeler bike, and my brother, Michael, 18 months my junior, had a smaller one. We'd race down a slight incline, and unsurprisingly I always seemed to win!
Dad had ridden motorbikes while doing national service in Germany and while in Thurlstone he acquired another one. He let Mum try it out in The Prospect. I vividly remember her riding it precariously, not having good control of the throttle, straight into a telegraph pole at the bottom of the slope into the yard. She fell off and afterwards, I learnt she had fainted. In my infant mind, she was dead! She was taken to a 'barn' under some of the houses to recover. I can remember being traumatised and beating my father's legs saying, "You've killed my mummy.
You'll have to get us a new one now!" Thankfully, smelling salts were administered and Mum came around.
Loads of leaves used to pile up under the trees on Rockside. Michael and I would take turns to hide under them while the other played at being scared by ambling past the pile and being totally unaware that there was a monster underneath who would jump out and scare you!
I stood or sat on this grass at the bottom of Rockside, at least a couple of times, spending hours writing down vehicle registration numbers. Sometimes you'd get the same number coming back the other way and the driver would give you a wave.
Our grandad, Joe, bought us some Triang tip-up trucks. Mine was blue, Michael's was red.
Across from the house were an embankment and a ledge that I liked playing on. I would pretend-drive my blue truck along the ledge and release it allowing it to tumble down 'over the cliff'. It was great fun! I showed Michael and told him I could do it with his lorry if he'd like. I picked his red lorry up, sent it along the ledge, and watched it tumble. To my shame, it broke! He ran off crying, I should think I got my legs tanned for breaking his truck. I carried on playing with mine. It was obviously made of sterner stuff than his!
Around the side and back of the house was a path² that ran all the way down, through a wood, to the stepping stones on the River Don. There were foxgloves in the wood. And bees. I imagined there were actual foxes around just waiting to put on those foxgloves to keep themselves warm in winter. The bees built a nest at the back of our garden wall, one time. Dad poured boiling water all over it!
School
Above: Possibly 1963 or 4.
Back Row L to R: 1. John Birkinshaw, 2. Philip Boothroyd, 3. Michael Squires, 4. David Briggs, 5. Alan Winter(me), 6. Peter Snell, 7. Gerald Parker, 8. (Is it Kevin)?
Midde Row: 9. Andy Beever,10. Stephen Walsh ?,11,12 Georgina Brahma,13. Lesley Roblett, 14. Elizabeth Thompson, 15. Linda Senior, 16. Naomi Barraclough, 17. Tony Hampshire?
Front Row: 18. Bridget Doyle, 19. (I thought it was Gillian Ford but she says not), 20. Christine Shawcross, 21. ?? (it's not one of the Gray's), 22. Janet Faxon, 23. Sandra Palfreman.
In the Thurlstone of the early 1960s, we walked to school. Down through the trees, across the River Don, the route through Windmill Lane to Watering Place Road was accessible then (but not in 2023), across the Manchester Rd, and along Towngate. Just a third of a mile, actually, but it seemed a lot further with the steep valley sides of the Don to contend with; well, that and being infant-sized.
Dad would walk with us, as far as Manchester Rd.
He'd see us across the road as it was so busy. Then he'd go to work at the Manchester Rd Co-operative. Along the way, he'd help my brother on the crossing stones if the water was high. If I was unlucky, the stones across the Don were slippery and I fell in soaking my short trousers, necessitating a hike back up the path through the trees, back to Mum who would have to find me some dry clothing. Then I'd have to take the long route down Rockside and round the long way via the A628.
My shoelace would often come undone on Towngate, and somebody's parent taking their child to school would notice it and suggest fastening it up for me, for which I was grateful.
In school, you had to put your hand up to ask a question. The three R's were taught to us - Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmatic. At first, you learnt to write printed letters, but once mastered you had to learn to do joined-up writing.
At playtime there would be free school milk, one-third of a pint in a glass bottle, nice in winter as it was cold, but disgusting in summer as it was really too warm unless it had been stood in water. You had to push a straw through the foil top to drink it.
If the weather was nice we'd go on a nature walk. Mrs Horton and Mrs Latimer were a couple of the teachers who took us. Generally, we'd go northwesterly up Royd Moor Road. You had to walk single file and pay attention especially if there was a car coming along, which was rare.
In school, perhaps we played party games like pass the parcel, musical chairs, and blind man's buff. I can definitely recall music lessons, where you might get a triangle to ting or a tambourine to shake. The lucky ones had a go on a Xylophone. It could be my imagination but I'm sure there were mouth organs, too. Not that I've ever mastered how to play one.
And there were beanbags. A small bag covered in grey or brown material and filled with dried beans. Not sure why, perhaps we threw them to each other, or they were used as markers in running games?
PE was in the hall across the road from the school. In the room on the left as you look at it from the road, children used skipping ropes to skip with. I couldn't skip, but I found a diversion that I enjoyed; it involved holding the skipping rope at one end and then shaking it with all my might in the pretence that it was a wild nasty snake! We were also encouraged to use wooden hula hoops during PE.
The other half of this hall across the road from the school was the dining room. Meals were paid for weekly, collected on Monday morning by the class teacher (or on Tuesday if your Mum ever forgot to give it to you) unless you were poor and then you got them for free. I think one or two were 'poor' and you felt sorry for them being shown up in class. Meals, as far as I can think, were standard potato, meat and veg, perhaps a shepherd's pie, followed by rice pudding, semolina, jam-roly-poly or a sponge pudding. I've never liked chocolate sponge so if that was served I would have left it.
I had an aversion to eating mashed swede, although peculiarly I liked carrots. I couldn't understand why they went to all the trouble of separating out the middle of carrots from a carrot, just to mash it up and serve it separately and call it swede? That is until I asked a dinner lady about it and she told me they weren't from carrots at all!
In the playground, if I had my raincoat with me, I might put it over my shoulders like a cape and run around pretending to be Batman or Superman! A peculiar child!
But I joined in with the usual playground games and songs which included 'Farmer Wants a Wife', 'Big Ship Sails Through the Alley-Alley-O', 'Ring-a- ring o'roses', and 'London Bridge is falling down'.
Some girls would have played hopscotch and done french (elastic) skipping, a couple of schoolday's games that to this day I have never known the rules of, or how the heck you do it.
We must have had toilets at the school, but I can't recall whereabouts these were located. Most schools at that time, had them outside, near the playground and without roofs. And did we have a tuck shop? Perhaps we did. But if the dinner money had just been paid in perhaps we had nothing much left over for sweets.
One time, I think it was after a school holiday, we came back to find crimson powder paint spilt all over the corridor. Apparently, there had been a break-in.
There were days when we couldn't go home straight after school as Mum was working in a care home towards Penistone. On those days, we had to go to the Co-op where Dad worked and wait upstairs 'and be quiet'. This area had a distinctive smell about it, a sort of mixture of sawdust and flour; musty. There were plenty of wooden mouse traps in this attic, so assume they often caught mice. In those days very few things were prepacked. People wanting butter would have a quantity sliced off a huge block; flour was weighed out from a sack. So, those sort of things might be stored upstairs until needed downstairs.
Sometimes we'd go into the butcher's shop on Manchester Rd where Mum, possibly Dad too, on different days, would stand chatting with Annie Marsden as she used her meat grinder to manually squeeze minced meat from her contraption into skins to make the sausages.
At weekends, when it was warm, Mum and Dad would sometimes walk my younger brother and me from our home in The Prospect, up Rockside and down Leapings Lane, and back again. We'd look at the trees and try to learn their names. Sycamores, hazels, silver birch, trees with catkins, trees with holly, and so on. Over a stone wall towards the Don was a lovely patch of moorland grass with heathers, bilberries and blackberries growing nearby. Mum would make some sandwiches, potted meats, cheese and tomato, jam, and pile it all with cake into a wicker basket, along with a flask of tea, and perhaps some biscuits and squash, and we'd sit there enjoying this wonderful outdoor space, and asking each other if we'd seen a rabbit, as there were plenty of rabbit-droppings where we were sitting!
When I was 6, possibly 7, I was deemed old enough to follow the same route along Leapings Lane, across the Don and all the way around to St Saviour's Parish Church on a Sunday morning all by myself. Only 0.66 of a mile, but seemed more like three miles in today's money! There, I was in the church choir and was paid 3d a week.
One day, Dad came home with a tv! It was so exciting as we hadn't had one before. You had to have one person holding the tv aerial, trying to get reception while another tried to tune it into BBC or ITV. Then we'd sit down to watch and suddenly the picture would go all fuzzy again. I do recall Dad calling me one time to watch the news. The Beatles were being screamed at in an airport and he thought I would like to see it.
At the church I'd risen from a mere 'choirboy' at 3d a week, to 'choirboy that sorted out all the bookmarks for the rest of the choir' at 6d a week, and had just started to enjoy this new wealth.
I was just a couple of years at Thurlstone Primary School. Dad had got himself a job 'down south' and so, in February 1964, it was time to depart.
Footnotes
¹ Through Facebook Group, Past Pupils Thurlstone Primary School,
I made contact with Janice Pearce who lived at my Prospect address prior to me. Fascinating chat here.
² In the 1900s map above, a footbridge (F.B.) is marked. The bridge was apparently washed away in 1912 and never replaced. The stepping stones were also washed away years later, but after I left the village. The footpath was open until 1979 (source: Penistone Archive Group, Facebook, 2023).
