Читать книгу Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words - Max Arthur, Max Arthur - Страница 57

After my brother was born, my mother died, so my father was landed with two little boys. We had no other women in the family but our two aunts, so they offered a very happy solution, that we should go and live with them in South Shore, Blackpool. So I went in 1898, and we went to Raggett's kindergarten and then to Arnold School.

I remember a day's fishing trip in January 08. We'd been on our bikes to Garston, fishing in the river there, and I got the biggest fish I'd ever seen in my life. We wrapped it in some newspaper and I put it across my handlebars. Frank Raynor worked in the newsagent shop, so I asked him to weigh the fish for me. And it was five pounds! I was thrilled. Just as I was leaving, Frank said, ‘Jack, have you seen this? It's a new book we've just got in.’ It was called Scouting For Boys by Baden-Powell, and I thought, ‘This is something new.’

I could hardly put it down and I read it through three times that night, and before the end of the evening I decided that I was going to get some lads together and join the Boy Scouts. There was no Army about it – never military – it was quite the reverse. It was the outdoor life, camping and cooking, birds and animals, and singing. I wrote out the first chapter that night, and put down a list of chaps I was going to ask to join. And when I'd finished with them, they were as enthusiastic as I was. I'd copied the chapter out and we made more copies from that over the weekend. We had a meeting every day that week, I got these chaps red-hot on scouting. It was out of this world. We formed our little patrol in the next six days. I had seven or eight people and I made myself the patrol leader. We picked on the name of Lions, as I thought it was a good sturdy animal, and in any case I couldn't make many animals' noises – but I could roar.

We sent fourpence for a dozen membership cards to the head office. Our first outing was the first weekend – we didn't waste any time – we were getting down to it. We were never short of things to do. We could walk up to the cliffs and all round was fields. Then sometimes if we were at my end of Blackpool, we could go down in the sandhills with the wildlife. We used to camp in the hills, not far from home, and we'd all got bicycles. We did all the usual things, and in the summer we went fishing and scouting and signalling and we collected cigarette cards and football cards.

We did all right for uniforms – we were in short trousers anyway, and we could always get short khaki or blue trousers, and a green shirt. My aunts made the shirts. When I went to Cheshire I made my own uniform – I got my tailor's badge for that.