Open Writing

A 78 record was playing in the other room. I knew and liked the tune; ‘I’ve got my eyes on you’. The singer was Leslie Hutchinson, better known as Hutch.

Hutch was my Aunty Betty’s favourite as well as the darling of the London and Paris smart set. “I’ve got my eyes on you – so best beware ere you roam. I’ve got my eyes on you – so don’t stray too far from home.”

Betty was my mother’s younger sister, one of six, and Betty and Uncle Albert lived at 22 Fox Lane on the newly built Frecheville estate on the outskirts of Sheffield.

They had lived with my mum and dad, Nellie and Walter, in the railway cottage in Killamarsh where I was born in 1931. They both put their names down for one of the scarce new houses and after a demanding interview for suitability, we were allocated number 14, and the Stamford’s number 22.

I was three years old when we moved in but now as I listened to the music, I was almost seven.

“Incidentally, I’ve set my spies on you – I’m checking on all you do, from A to Zee.”

The music floated through to the kitchen from the console gramophone in the front room. The internal horn was the last word in sound reproduction that Wilson Peck could supply and winding up the turntable motor was done in seconds. The needle sharpener was built into the superb mahogany cabinet lid, an elegant piece indeed.

“So darling, just be wise – keep your eyes on me”.

Although different in temperament, Uncle Albert and my dad were good pals. Albert worked at the abattoir, doing something unspeakable to animals, and Dad was a Linesman working in Woodhouse for the LNER Company.

If dad was even a few minutes late coming home from work, my mother started to worry. She would go to the window looking for him every few minutes until he appeared around the corner from Longstone Crescent. He had walked up the fields from Intake tram terminus.

The worrying quickly passed to me and I too was always relieved when his smiling face came into view.

A train had struck and killed a close workmate as he and Dad walked together down the line and the station boss had asked him to break the news to his wife. He returned from the house ashen and deeply shocked but that seemed to be the way of it then.

The party was warming up next door and Albert was in and out of the kitchen replenishing beers, sherries and whiskies and orange. He was also keeping his eye on us, a motley collection of cousins of all ages, many given to mischief when bored.

Aunty Betty had rewound the gramophone and replaced the worn copper needle. Another Hutch favourite filled the room.

“When they begin the Beguine – It brings back a sound of music so tender. It brings back a night of tropical splendour.”

War with Germany was in the air and a good twelve months before all households were allocated Anderson Shelters by the government, Dad and Albert decided to build their own in the garden of 22. Dad managed to beg some iron reinforcing rods for the concrete and together they built a potentially lethal ‘safe-haven’ on their free weekends.

Its principal features were two-foot thick walls, a miniscule entrance and no escape door,. Standing water was an unpleasant, secondary feature.

In 1940 Albert’s brother Maurice, who turned the scale at twenty stone, rushed into the shelter in a blind panic during a false alarm, air raid alert. After the ‘all-clear’ siren had sounded, it soon became obvious that Maurice’s bulky frame was just not able to make the return journey.

Once again panic set in but this also failed to free him from, what all agreed, was the most disagreeable of tombs. Fortunately, Albert had access to liberal quantities of dripping and Maurice emerged three hours later much chagrined. He was naked, filthy and reeking of pork fat but remarkably in the circumstances, still just in time for his morning shift at Vickers where he worked as a fitter.

“It brings back a memory evergreen. I’m with you once more, under the stars – and down by the shore, an orchestras playing. And even the palms seem to be swaying – When they begin the Beguine.”

The food for the party, carefully prepared by my Mother, Aunty Betty and Aunty Doris that afternoon, was set out on a table in the kitchen. We had been given strict, very strict, instructions that this was for the adults and informed that our sandwiches, jelly, cake etc were in the pantry out of reach until the proper time whatever that meant. Nothing was to be touched except the lemonade and crisps. As the evening wore on we looked enviously at the seeming mountain of boiled ham, scotch eggs, pork pie, tinned salmon and salads of all descriptions.

There were dishes of trifle, tinned fruit, jelly and blancmange, cream, cakes of all descriptions and several cheeses. The whole set out with great pride, the best china on a rare outing. Surely there was not long to wait now, we were bored as well as hungry.

“That old black magic has me in its spell – that old black magic that you weave so well ”

Surely not another Hutch record.

Two of us were pushing and shoving each other under the table in some sort of game. The table was in fact also the clothes mangle, cleverly designed to do double duty. Every house on Frecheville had the same model as standard equipment together with a two-burner gas ring, back-to-back oven and a few other essentials.

I became fascinated by the ‘under- table’ mechanism and decided to pull a rather inviting green painted lever.

“ Down and down I go – Round and round I go. In a.”

There was a deafening and terrifying crash as the tabletop rushed towards me and the table contents whooshed to the floor. A slurry of broken china, glass, salmon, celery, blancmange, trifle et al, covered half the kitchen and many of its occupants.

“Down and down I go – Like a leaf that’s…”

The record scraped to a stop - I was done for.

“I only pulled the green lever,” I whined as I was dragged, without ceremony or mercy, back to No 14.
END
1091 words

Derek Maqueen Sheffield U3A