At home… I was now the eldest of seven. Dad kept me off
school for a couple of days. ‘Stay here and help your mam,’ he said, so I did,
running errands to the shops, helping with the little ones and doing anything
that needed doing while Mam looked after my new baby brother. The arrival
of a sister two years earlier had interrupted a run of five successive boys so I was
glad normal service had been resumed, even if it meant we’d need a nappy bucket
in our kitchen for another two or three years. No matter, the smell of
ammonia was something I’d grown up with.
At school…
Break
time. The playground was deserted. Blue skies and sunny days meant everyone was
up on the field. So what if the football season was over and the goalposts had
been taken down, I still wanted to play football. In a blazers-for-goalposts game,
Peter Burtenshaw – in goal – tossed a lightweight kiddies ball to Mark Honey,
who turned on it as it bounced, intent on lumping it up our end. He’d done it a
couple of times already, but not this time. Ready and waiting, I pounced to catch
the ball on the volley and sent it whistling past Burty’s lughole. I’d rarely
got the better of Mark, but in that instant I experienced one of
football’s perfect moments.
Days when
it was too hot for football were rare and probably just as well, as other
amusements often lead to mischief. One such mischief occurred when some 1A2
boys gave a girl a scragging on the field. Staying well clear might not have
been the noblest thing to do but it saved me from getting caught up in an
incident that came very close to getting out of hand. Though there was no
police involvement, the boys were rightly hauled over the coals and made to
apologise for any distress they might have caused. From what I saw they got off
lightly, as the girl involved could have pushed it much further, had she so
wished.
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