Made In Hull By Maurice Fairfield Part Three - The Calm before, (The Storm)(1/2)

(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

Things which happened in the thirties flutter by me like calendar leaves in an old movie and I try to catch some of them as they fly. There was the Graf Zeppelin which flew over Hull in 1932 as part of a goodwill tour. Many people believed that its crew were photographing the docks and industries with an eye to future bombing. They were probably right.

I remember the Graf hovering over Rovers' ground. As long as the football pitch. Unnaturally big.. A great, silver grey, threatening mass. Hanging low, its engines humming like a million bees, until the hum deepened and grew in volume and it accelerated away across the city.

Hitler was tightening his grip on Europe and stories about his persecution of the Jews were in the papers and sometimes the newsreels. Peoples attitudes towards German Jews was sympathetic. Anti-Semitism was only rarely a feature of street life probably because Jews were little if anything more prosperous than most of the rest of us and they blended in.

There was a Plumber named Jacobs and he answered without apparent rancour to the nickname Jewy, along with everyone else with this surname, Jewish or not.

We read about the Italian attacks on Abyssinia and of the Civil War in Spain. One of my uncles in Beverley joined the International Brigade and fought on the Government side against Franco's army. The memory of the First World War was fresh in the minds of only slightly older people, who were full of warnings about air-raids which they had suffered only twenty years before.

As well as the bucket type privies the gas street lights got modernised and now lit up automatically.

The old man who had come up the street on his bike touching a long pole to each gas-mantle in turn vanished forever. I recall lampposts clearly because I had my first sexual sensation when I was climbing one. I suppose I am lucky that I didn't become fixated on very tall, very thin women with short stubby arms.

We (the children) carried on along our usual paths - Saturday afternoon matinees at the pictures. Twopence admission and programmes consisting mostly of cowboy films along with the three stooges and Rin Tin Tin.

Our favourite cowboys were Tom Mix and Ken Maynard and we preferred them to the cissy cowboys who sang songs and played guitars and even kissed cowgirls. Tom Mix came all the way from Hollywood to Hull doing an act on the stage of the Palace Variety Theatre on Anlaby Road - trick shooting and twirling a lariat. He rode his horse on to the stage but he didn't have enough room to do much fancy riding.

My mother got an attendant to get me one of his used cartridges. I took it to school and showed it to my mates but they didn't believe me. I used to get threepence for the pictures on Saturday - the twopence to get in and a ha'penny each way on the tram. I would go with some older boys who would have died rather than spend the tram fare on the tram. We walked there and back and spent the penny on sweets.

These were the days of the "tidemark." In between the weekly bath we washed our faces and after a couple of days there was a definite line between the washed face and the unwashed neck. I don't know if it was because we played harder and fell down more or whether it was because we wore short trousers until we were about fourteen, but our knees were always battle-scarred and decorated by really horrible scabs. The word hygiene wasn't in our vocabulary. When the doctor called at our homes he carried his thermometer in his breast pocket and, after he took your temperature he put it back for the next patient he visited. We must have developed immune systems like the Bank of England.

Continued on www.thisisull.com...... Next Page (2/2).

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