As we almost lived on the cricket field as kids during the summers of our youth, evicting us for the winter was harder than a bunch of travellers. It was our turf and this was where we hung out although the Committee never had to resort to bailiffs.
Only Jack Frost would eventually persuade us that the three bar electric fire at home would be more welcoming. I would sit in front of it all winter flicking “bogeys” and watching them curl up like pork scratchings, wishing away the days till Spring came around again.
On the winter weekends football was our game because we simply loved playing sport and, whatever the weather, we would be outside getting “black bright” as the saying went.
I am sure this term would be banned now by the politically correct brigade but you know what I mean and it’s far too late for me to become PC.
We played full-blown games between the expensively recruited Willow Gardens fancy-dans and the rest of us from the other side of the tracks that led from grandly named streets like Kings Road and Kingsway, though we rarely played like kings.
They had shiny kits by Admiral and Le Coq Sportif plus shin guards. We had old cotton vests, wrinkly socks displaying bandy white legs and baggy shorts which made a few of us look like Stanley Matthews even if we could not dribble around the coats that made up the goal posts.
The only dribbling we ever did was when the leggy Caroline Haigh sauntered into the ground on occasion to offer us a glimpse of what we could not even imagine.
When we could not get a full game going – largely due to the arrival of Browny the groundsman in his spluttering sports car rescued from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – we played mini games on the spare land where the clubhouse now sits.
This was a bumpy and over-grown area which had allegedly been “good for courtin’“. Amorous suitors would disappear into the long grass for afternoons of discovery, coming out ruddy faced and covered in grass only to discover a cricket match in full flow.
For shooting practice we used the old garage – situated where the clubhouse entrance is now – culminating in the door being buckled to such an extent that it would not shut.
It could not have been my fault, as most people know I could never hit a barn door from three paces resulting in several long decades as a Sunday league defender.
The lack of security hardly seemed to matter as there was nothing in the garage worth nicking with the advent of a motorised lawn mower still years away at the perennially broke Villas. Pushing away our hand-push mower was not deemed a threat.
In the summer we also used to climb onto it’s rickety asbestos roof to spy on the legendary Mrs Blackburn who liked nothing better than to get her kit off and catch some rays in her back garden, lathering on the Ambre Solaire, unaware of her young stalkers.
We even “borrowed” Billy Stockdale’s binoculars one day and perched up there all afternoon, burning in the sun, waiting for signs of movement. Had my mum known why my back was so burnt the Calamine lotion would have been force fed rather than rubbed in.
Some days we would try getting closer, crawling on all fours through the long grass, weeds and dog shit. We would never have made the SAS, so soon it was back to risking a broken neck, sun-stroke and asbestos poisoning to cop a glance of wrinkly old Mrs B’s wrinklies.
We were encouraged in our footballing endeavours by a great guy called Barry Boyd and his dad, Percy. They set up our very first five-a-side team – The White Arrows – entering tournaments all over Bradford. We won little, collected many bruises but had many great days out.
Barry was a single guy in his thirties living with his dad in a house adjacent to the field. He had a great job “on the road” for a local bakery and just did his bit to keep most of us out of jail.
He was my role model for later life; I wanted that company car and all those afternoons off!
This was a different age and nobody cared about CRB checks or cramming thirteen of us into a Morris Ital and haring off to a tournament. Percy’s death was calamitous for Barry who seemed to give up on life almost immediately and our team died too. He was a lovely bloke.
All of us owe him a huge debt of gratitude for some wonderful times and encouraging our love of sport in general because he followed our cricket with equal enthusiasm. You see, there were good guys back then also.
Proving we were multi-dimensional, we also converted the outfield into a golf course which caused Browny to become convinced he had moles on the field following a mysterious outbreak of holes.
The only golf clubs we could muster were old rickety wooden-shafted things that sent a shock through your arms and body like a pneumatic drill every time you hit the ball.
Our balls were hardly Ping more ping-pong, recovered from bushes and lakes and sold cheap by the dozen – which is how frequently we lost them.
My neighbour Fred gave me a set of hickory shafted clubs in an old cloth bag that looked like a worn out condom and must have been older than him.
Only the Tattersalls had “proper” clubs as dad Denis was a wool merchant and he would bring all sorts of goodies back from his travels to the Far East.
And so it was that middle son Richard joined us one afternoon for driving practice. With our stone age clubs we could barely drive the modest distance from Duck’s house to the wicket let alone the other side of the field.
After a couple of plays and misses – very much like his batting – Richard finally creamed this ball off the elevated tee with his gleaming new five iron and watched horrified as it sailed across the field like an Exocet missile, whizzed through a hedge and was followed by the explosion of broken glass. Another weapon of mass destruction had landed.
Equally as quickly, Richard abandoned the sleek new five iron sprinting off in the opposite direction of home. It was left to Denis’s chequebook to achieve peace and goodwill to all and I had a new five iron tucked into the old condom.
If only they could have solved the Middle East as easy nobody would ever have heard of Tony Blair.
There were other games we played as a group of youngsters that did not result in damage to the ground or the surrounding houses but were more likely to cause us a lifetime of invalidity.
British Bulldogs was a game where the big lads basically hammered the smaller lads. The “rules” were simple; you ran at a wall of lads – like American footballers minus the protective gear – and tried to get from one line to another.
You either went around, over or under the “wall”; some made a late attempt when bodies were all over the place to sneak past unnoticed but you just got smashed even more.
There were big lads like Brent Shackleton, Nick “Ginger” Gibson and the psychotic Brian “Ackers” Ackroyd. In addition there were proper rugby players like Rick Lawrence and John Brennan who liked to hone their bone-breaking techniques. It was not a good time to be a seven stone weakling.
The most exhilarating game though was with Ackers. From his bedroom window overlooking the changing rooms, he would challenge us to make the ten-yard dash from the changing rooms to score-hut, trying to shoot us with his air rifle as we sprinted and rolled.
You may find this hard to believe but he had no shortage of volunteers and the adrenalin surge was far better than Red Bull or a fumble in the long grass.
As the days continued to shorten we always had the final event of the year, Bonfire Night, starting almost as soon as the season ended with “progging” for wood.
We collected wood by various means; begging, more often stealing and sometime borrowing it although the borrowed stuff was seldom returned for obvious reasons.
One year, we “acquired” a huge number of planks courtesy of NEGAS (North Eastern Gas Board) which were clearly marked with their distinctive livery.
Not to be deterred we then stole some of Browny’s whitener from the garage and painted all the planks to disguise our haul. Had the Kray twins been local our destinies may well have changed for good.
It was a military style operation but the following day an irate local builder turned up accusing us of nicking his planks. When he identified the stolen NEGAS as his own, hauling them on to his van simultaneously threatening our human rights with a a “right good towelling” we were wetting ourselves but only with laughter.
The NEGAS logo was still embossed on the edge of all the planks, something we had all missed despite our planning, so we hoped he would enjoy his spell in the nick.
Local gangs competed to build the biggest fire and often our competitive spirits would overflow as we sought to take out our rivals. Close by to the field was Old Boothy’s farm and son Richard was head of the clan.
One night, Adi Walton and I undertook a midnight raid on the farm. Their fire was massive and looked like it would burn for days – and it did – sadly about a week before scheduled. We only intended to light a bit of it but it went up like a funeral pyre and soon Adi & I were contemplating our own.
As the night sky burned brighter than London in the Blitz Adi and I realised we were dead unless there was a quick boat to Spain along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal; Boothy would toast us.
The Booth Clan did not need Interpol to figure out the culprits and arrived the following day, marching down the driveway at the cricket club like a marauding army. We shit our pants.
This was when I discovered that negotiating may be a good future career move. Somewhat hopefully, we had locked the cricket club gates but they just climbed over. We had no boiling tar or cross-bows to fight back plus they were miles bigger.
So we brokered a peace where they got our wood and we avoided getting our heads kicked in. Adi promptly vanished never to be seen again emerging last year as a tax exile in nearby Ilkley post re-constructive surgery.
I saw Richard decades later in Mrs Day’s confectioners and offered, as one last gesture of peace, to buy him a vanilla. We both smiled at long gone memories of distant days and went our separate ways knowing life would never be so innocent again.
Sometimes our “enterprise” was misguided – clearly from the above -but I would like to use this opportunity to offer an apology to an unknown old lady for nicking her bench and offer to the Gods the knowledge that Jonathan “Chorlton” Elliott had nothing to do with it.
One night we had been out scavenging for wood when we came upon the bench. Chorlton was a boy of conscience and reasoned that it may be some old lady’s, she may be blind and her Labrador may not tell her that the bench had gone as she sat down for her early morning cuppa.
Nevertheless, we uplifted the bench and began to haul it away to its final resting place atop our growing pyre. Although he was a man of conscience Chorlton was not averse to a degree of violence and began to lay lighted fireworks in our path.
It was like walking through Standard Firework’s version of a minefield and I’m sure we would have been in mortal danger had Chorlton bought some of those dodgy Chinese home explosives.
And so if your mum or gran came out one morning and she was blind and ended up on her backside, then on behalf of all of us I apologise. We were, after all, only growing up.
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