Читать книгу London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City - Sidney Day - Страница 13

There was something to do on the heath all year round. In the winter there was ice skating and tobogganing. We would go on the building sites and nick some quartering and some boarding, then take it all home and make sledges out of it. We used the steel lathes from old beds for the runners. Then, when the snow come along we would drag them all up the heath and let them out at sixpence for a half hour. Every day me, Ruddy, Joey and Cocker would be up there taking the money or sledging ourselves. The run went from the top of the hill to the bottom by the bandstand.

When the ponds froze up and they give the all clear to skate, plenty of people would be over there. We hung round the ponds and nicked their skates when they wasn’t looking and then we either sold them or let them out. I couldn’t skate though, not even roller skate.

In the summer we would all swim. We taught ourselves to swim, just jumped in and splashed about till we could do it. There was three ponds. The first one weren’t good for swimming really as it was full of leeches, but we took no notice, just brushed them off. Fishing weren’t allowed there but we did it anyway, and we caught roach, carp and bream. We caught them with blood worms that we fished out of the compost in the cemetery. We caught rats too by baiting the hook with food. When we caught them we held them up and killed them with a stick. Sometimes I would take a whole clutch of ducklings from the pond and rear them at home. We would even catch swans for a bit of devilment and move them onto another pond. We took their eggs for eating, but only one from each clutch cause they was a nice looking bird.

The second pond was mainly for boating and fishing. People would take their little boats there and dogs was allowed to swim there too. Right opposite was the iron well. The water welled up red from the ground and filled up the pond. We often stopped to drink the red water. People would bring cans and bottles to fill up cause the water was good for you. They come from all over for that water.

Me father first took me to the iron well when I had sticky, sore eyes. He would bathe them and then say, ‘Now drink some.’ Dad was a clever old boy—he knew a lot about healing and was a popular man. There was always someone coming round saying, ‘Bill, have you got this? Bill, what do you make of that?’ He had a lot to do with horses in the war so people would sometimes come up and say, ‘Bill, will you come up and see to the old horse, he’s got the mange?’ For mange he used sulphur sticks ground down to powder, mixed with a block of lard and then rubbed into the horse’s coat. He always put a stick of sulphur in the dogs’ water too.

The third pond was the swimming pond. It was for men and boys all week, except for Wednesdays when women could swim there. The swimmers got undressed in a fenced-off bit with partitions. We would watch them come in, see what sort of clothes they had on and follow them when they went out to jump in the water. As soon as they jumped in, back we went and rifled their clothes. If they was better than our’n we nicked them and left our old ones there for them. When I got home me mum would say, ‘Where d’you get that from?’ ‘Off of the rag and bone man,’ I would reply.

There was a concrete diving board at the swimming pond that was about thirty-three foot high. It was the first Olympic diving board. They come from all over the globe to dive from there into fifteen foot of water. One summer night we was up there fishing at two or three o’clock in the morning. We always took a big old umbrella fishing in case it rained. I picked it up.

‘Watch this,’ I says.

I climbed up to the top of the board and jumped off with the umbrella as a parachute. Then all me mates had to do it too.

Over by Jack Straw’s Castle was more ponds—the Leg of Mutton Pond and Whitestone Pond. Whitestone was a man-made pond made out of white stone with a little wall either side. It was used as a drive through for horse and carts—anything that was pulled by a horse. The horses would go through during hot weather. As they got in deeper the water covered the hubs of the wheels. It got into all the cracks and the wood swelled. That stopped the dried-out old wheels from sounding so creaky.

I sometimes took Babs over Parliament Hill Fields first thing in the morning on me own. I always let the dog have a swim when we was over there. One morning, as we got near to the first pond, I seen what I thought was a football about twenty or thirty foot out from the edge. I threw a piece of wood in so Babs would go in and get the ball. As she got near, she went to try and grab it, like a dog would do. Then I seen it was a bowler hat. The hat went down and come up again and I seen a face. It was a man, drownded hisself. I thought to meself, ‘Blimey, the poor sod’s dead.’ He must have been in there some time cause you don’t float till after so many hours or days.

I went and found a keeper and told him there was a dead bloke in the pond. He come down and had a look then went to the swimming pond run by the head keeper. They got a punt, carried it up to where the man was, put it in the water, punted out and dragged the body in. After a while the other keepers come round and they covered the body over with a black tarpaulin. Then the police arrived with a basket trolley—a basket about six foot long on wheels that was used as a stretcher. They put the bloke on it and took him away.

Me and Babs watched the whole show but they never asked me a thing, not even me name and address. I never knew what had happened to the man. All I ever knew about him was that he would have had a good job, like in a bank. You knew what people did by the hats they wore. A butcher, a salesman or a grocer wore a straw hat. A builder wore a soft cap. Anybody of any breeding wore a trilby hat. But blokes with jobs in offices and banks, like the one in the pond, wore a bowler hat with a pinstripe suit and they always carried an umbrella.

I seen several others pulled out of the swimming pond dead. As well as the diving board, the swimming pond had two rafts in the middle what you could get up on and dive into the water. Some people went to go over there thinking they could swim when they couldn’t. The keepers had a long pole with three hooks on the bottom and they used this to fish out anyone who went under. Several times I seen the keeper go out in the punt and haul a dead person out of the drink.

Women could only swim on a Wednesday till a pond inside the grounds of Kenwood was opened for women only. We would go there and watch the gels swimming. We couldn’t get too near to them but had to stay about fifteen or twenty yards away. They soon had a diving board there too, made of scaffle boards and poles. A bloke called Captain Webb arranged for it to be built for them. Captain Webb lived in a great house up West Hill at the end of Lady Burdett-Coutts’ estate. He was more or less like the Prince of Wales as he was very important and well known for being charitable.

The other thing we liked doing was a bit of horse riding. The people who owned Kenwood let the Express Dairies put their horses in the field to graze and have a rest, like. Sometimes they was out there for a week or—if it was a poor old horse—a month. They was pretty tame and we would climb over the fence with an old scaffle cord, creep up to the horse, put the rope in his mouth, jump on his back and fly round the field. The old gamekeepers would come after us and fire a gun to frighten us off. We would ride up to the fence as far as we could and leap over—once we was over the other side we was home and dry.