Made In Hull By Maurice Fairfield Part Two - Our Terrace (2/2)

(1/2), (2/2). Part One - Arundel Street Days Part Two - Our Terrace Part Three - The Calm before, (The Storm) Part Four - Schooldays Part Five - The War 1 Part Six - The War 2

In the winter we made winter warmers. A baked bean tin with a wire handle and holes punched in the sides with a nail. You burned rags in these to warm your hands on. If your fire cooled you swung the can around and the draught blew it into fresh life. Once a year to no set time-table, toffee apples appeared in the shops. Some people made proper toffee but others only dipped the apples into treacle and then into desiccated coconut. Some women made them in their homes and sold them on the doorstep.

Our marble game involved taking turns to bool your marble into a depression in the ground . Then you could shoot at the other man's marble. This small crater had the odd name tal - The German word for valley is tahl and the English - or rather Yorkshire word for valley is dale. I have never heard this word used in any other context and it is interesting to wonder if this probably Saxon word came down to us across the centuries via children's play language.

We swapped comics and boys adventure stories; the Rover and the Adventure, the Wizard and the Hotspur. They were racist (the villains were often sinister Orientals or W.W.1 Germans with monocles and thick accents). They were jingoistic and many stories glorified strong jawed upper class Englishmen keeping the natives of various countries in their place. They glorified war and we loved them. They were correctly spelt and they got us into the habit of reading. Once in a while the girls would get up a concert, rehearsing songs and dance numbers improvising costumes and performing with spirited enthusiasm.

On Guy Fawkes Night we lit our bonfire in the street. I don't think this was tolerated after the road surface was sealed with tar. It was a hair-raising sight to see the hoarded collection of fuel piled and lit close to the houses on each side of the roadway, and shooting skyward in fountains of sparks and multicoloured flames. Soaring into the November sky, intensifying as the effigies of the tortured Guy were tossed into the blaze. One year as the paint blistered on the nearest houses a fire engine came and the crew blew away the blaze with their hoses, washing the blackened steaming remains down the gutters.

This caused some resentment when the fire in Nornabell Street, just over Holderness Road burned on untouched. The general view was that Norny was too tough a street to mess about with. Another one was lit next year and outed by the firemen almost immediately and the practice died from then on.

For all I know, this street life may still continue in some form but I suspect that it slumped with the outbreak of the war and died with television and computer games and the rising tide of available toys and games which came with entirely desirable increasing prosperity, together with the move to less crowded living conditions. I only hope that the entire baby wasn't thrown out with the bathwater. The Street and its terraces made up a range of genuine communities composed of a rich variety of people with a wealth of talents and skills.

It would be a mistake to sentimentalise our lives. Some people were hungry sometimes. Many of the older ones, especially, never knew any good times except the ones they made themselves. We never went barefoot but our shoes were often thin canvas sandshoes worn with no socks. I have seen the medical statistics for the Street in the year I was born and the map is covered in red crosses indicating the death of a child from ailments shrugged off lightly in more recent years.

We were law abiding. Perhaps we should not have been but respect for, or rather fear of, authority was drummed into us from our earliest days. Old folk tended to be tiny, indicating the effect of limited food only a generation ago. My two daughters at ages ten and eight were as tall as many older people down Hessle Road where we lived in 1960. We were not always kind. There was only one black child in the street and he was not well treated. There was a chant nigger, nigger, pull the trigger, bang, bang, bang. which followed him around.

Photo courtesy of Steven Marsh

There was a fat older teenage girl (although that phrase and concept was still uninvented). Her passage through the street was sometimes marked by unkind mockery. We grew up to regret our words and attitude. I hope that they grew up to forgive us.

Things looked up as the thirties neared their ominous end. There were a few more jobs around. Young, single tradesmen in work, who were careful and could buy motorbikes on terms, although cars were a long way off. Girls with steady jobs at Reckitt's or Robby's Tin Works could dress up smartly and go dancing and looking sophisticated. Suits were tailored at Burtons or the Fifty Shilling Tailor.

Soon the War would stand everything on its head. Copyright 2004 © Maurice Fairfield

Continued on www.thisisUll.com Part Three - The Calm before, (The Storm)

Acknowledgements Photographs of Alexandra Avenue, Arundel Street and surrounding terraces were taken by the ARP in June 1940 to record air raid shelter provision. Maurice lived in Alex Ave at the time these photographs were taken. These fantastic photographs are reproduced with the kind permission of Martin Taylor of the Hull City Archives Thanks to Tony Cosgrove (Nortech) who generously donated the cost of the photographs.

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