Читать книгу London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City - Sidney Day - Страница 12

Winter was winter and summer was summer in them days. You knew when the snow was going to come, you knew when the winds was coming. In the winter we had snow and ice and it was very cold. In March we looked forward to terrific winds all the month. In the spring the sun come out, with all the lovely little flowers, and it got warmer and warmer. When the summer come you couldn’t walk on the pavements without shoes on it was that warm.

Where I lived it was like being in the countryside. Once you left Highgate Road there was Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead Heath and The Spaniards. Just up the road was Waterlow Park and Highgate Wood. Waterlow was a beautiful park. There was a lot of keepers there—not just one or two, dozens of them, always planting out. On the Highgate Hill side, as you walked in the gate, there was a beautiful aviary with lots of lovely birds—blimey, it was a picture to look at. The times I tried to nick birds out of that aviary, but there was always someone about.

All year, but specially in the summer holidays, I spent more time over Parliament Hill Fields and Hampstead Heath than anywhere else. As long as I come home for me food of a night time I could go out where I wanted. Kids of all ages went out all day long in the summer time. Me mum never seen me till it was time to go to bed at about ten o’clock. When it went dark we went to bed.

There was two estates near us where we could roam about. Lady Burdett-Coutts had a big place hedged with trees where we would often set our bird nets. She sold some of her land for building Hollylodge Estate, where me father worked on and off for years. It was a private estate with very expensive houses and a bowler-hatted gatekeeper who always knew everyone and who was in or out. That was where me sister Alice went into service.

The other big place was Kenwood House, which had a fence right the way round it—it must have had two or three miles of fencing. I would like as many pennies as I was in there. We would creep in to fish in the pond with cotton reels and worms stuck on pins till we was spied by one of the gamekeepers. The wood had lots of lovely birds in it—songbirds, pheasants, you name it.

When I was still at school they opened the house and estate to the public. Our school went to the opening and sang for the King who come to plant an oak tree. There was a big crowd there. It was a hot day and after the singing I ran home, bought some lemonade crystals, mixed them up with water, went back to Kenwood and sold lemonade for a penny a cup. After Kenwood was opened we often went inside the house to look at the rooms and the big pictures. It was free to get in.

Me dad was never sober when we was kids, but he was a proper father. He showed us where to go scrumping, where to go bird catching, where to go fishing. We collected walnuts in the season and pickled them. We made horseradish sauce by digging down deep for the root, grating it and mixing it with vinegar. We always had a pocket of beech nuts or cob nuts in the autumn. We made elderflower wine in spring and we made beez wine all year round. Dad bought the beez from the chemist shop at the bottom of our road. It looked like popcorn. We would put thruppence worth of these grains in water with sugar and watch them slowly sink to the bottom. After three months we would fish them out and it was ready to drink.

Me father had a ferret and he taught us how to catch rabbits in snares and we sold them for a bob each. We would go round with six on a stick hollering, ‘Bob each, wild rabbits, bob each, wild rabbits!’ Sometimes we caught birds to eat. Me dad would hang them up over the fire and eat them bones, beaks ‘n’all. I caught a partridge once over Kenwood and brought it home, but me dad grumbled at me and wanted to know why I’d killed such a pretty bird. We sometimes had a duck on Sunday for our dinner. We would catch ducks on a fishing line with a bit of crusty bread—bang!—the duck would take it up and we would winch him in. He would make a good dinner.

As soon as the summer holidays started, the first thing the old man did was take all our shoes away and lock them up. We had six or seven weeks’ holiday and all that time we never wore a pair of shoes or a pair of socks. We just run round barefoot.

Every day I would feed the chickens and the dogs and perhaps take the dogs round the block. Most mornings I would do some jobs for me mother too, like chop logs for the fire and for heating the water for washing. Sometimes I whitewashed the doorstep with the harstone brick which I dipped in water and rubbed on the step. It came up a lovely white. In Tiger Bay we had a little bit of pride, though we was poor. Everybody did their steps. Then I would find Ruddy, Joey Booth or another good mate of mine, George Tilley, who we called Cocker. Cocker was like a greyhound, taller than the rest of us and scrawny. The four of us was best mates.

Boys never went round with gels—it was always boys on their own and gels on their own. I didn’t know anything about gels, except how to pull the bow out of their hair. Boys was boys and gels was gels. I don’t think I ever knew what me sister and her friends got up to. I weren’t interested. We spent all our time walking or fishing. We walked anywhere, for miles every day. We might go to Hampstead Heath, through Kenwood, then walk to The Spaniards and past the Spaniards Inn. That pub had something to do with Dick Turpin. Opposite there was a dungeon where Turpin was supposed to have lived. We went down there one day but it was just an old cave.

At dinner time we would steal some vegetables from the allotments. Once Ruddy and I was out near Manor Park Road, East Finchley. It was all country out there, with loads of allotments and greenhouses. We was hungry so we went through the allotments picking a carrot here, a brussel sprout there, and we fed ourselves with little bits of vegetables. Then I spotted a big greenhouse with tomatoes growing in it.

I says to Ruddy, ‘There’s some nice tomatoes there. We’ll have a few of them.’

‘Righto, Cabby,’ he says.

They never locked the greenhouses so we just opened the door and went in. When we was inside I seen something fluttering out of the corner of me eye. It was a little wren trying to get out. Then I seen a double-barrelled gun lying on the bench. I picked it up, pulled the trigger and blew every bleeding pane of glass out the place—bang! Ruddy thought he was a dead’un, I think. The wren either flew away or got killed. Poor little bugger—they’re only as big as a sixpence. I don’t know what made me do it—I never even knew the gun was loaded. I just picked it up and pulled the trigger.

When we wasn’t wandering round we might play football or go running on the cinder track on the heath. Or we might have a day out and walk to Hadleigh Wood, not far from Barnet, to watch the trains go by on the railway line. As they went past we would stand there in a bleeding big cloud of smoke and steam. Me mum always used to say, ‘That smoke does you the world of good, breathe it in.’

We also liked to go to London Zoo. There was a canal along one side of the zoo and there was always loads of kids up on the bridge, diving into the water after pennies and ha’pennies thrown in by people passing by. They did it to see us dive and then they would stand and laugh. In we would go and scrabble round in the dirt to find those coppers. Nine times out of ten I went in nude, but sometimes I wore a pair of lady’s drawers tied with a drawstring at the knee.

On one trip I was with Cocker.

He says to me, ‘C’mon, Cabby, let’s go in the zoo and look round.’

‘Alright,’ I says.

So we swam over the canal and bunked into the zoo. It was a hot day so we soon dried off. We headed straight for the monkey house. We liked watching the old monkeys racing up and down and swinging on ropes. They was lads, the monkeys—always up to something. We bought some peanuts for a penny and fed them through the bars. Then we went up to the lion house and after that to see the elephants. We never did have a ride on an elephant—it was too dear.

On the way back from the elephants we passed some parrots.

‘Hang on, Sid,’ says Cocker.

He was looking at the beautiful coloured parrots and he gave them some peanuts. Then he reached over and grabbed one of them. The old parrot squawked but in a second Cocker had it stuffed inside his jersey. We walked straight out the gates with it. A few hours later we come across a bloke called Bridges who was a penny bookmaker.

‘Do you want to buy a parrot?’ says Cocker.

‘What kind of parrot is it?’ says Bridges.

‘Here he is—show him, George,’ I says.

Cocker got the parrot out and it started hollering and hooting.

‘I’ll give you two bob for it,’ says Bridges.

‘C’mon then, let’s have yer money,’ I says.

At six o’clock at night we was always home for tea. The two-handled pan would be on the hob full of hot broth. I might have that and a lump of bread and dripping. Some-times me mum made bread pudding or rice pudding. She was an excellent cook and it was said that she once worked as a cook in the palace. There weren’t anyone in the world that could cook a rice pudding like me mum. She often said about me, ‘He would sooner have a basin of rice pudding than anything else!’ An hour later we would be back on the heath till dark.