In The Small Hours: When Balaclava Met His Waterloo
...But if the weather was wet, which it always seemed to be, I would board a tram and hide under the stairs whilst the conductor was upstairs collecting his fares. Eventually I would be found and put off, but at least I had reduced my run. On one occasion I slipped under the stairs and there beside me, propped up, was a little white coffin, the parents frowned at me from the lower deck, they would be going to the cemetery some stops up the line....
John Brian Leaver tells of Lancashire schooldays during wartime - and a tram conductor he called Old Balaclava.
My parents and I lived on the northern outskirts of an East Lancashire mill town. My journey to school consisted of a tram ride that took me within a quarter mile of the town's centre, a trip of nearly three miles.
Each day my mother would give me the return fare of three old pence, one-and-a-half pence each way. I would be eight at the time, in 1940.
The trams kept to the same route, with the same crew of driver and conductor. One of the trams that ran this line had, for its conductor, an elderly gent who had been called out of retirement as the younger employees had been conscripted; his frame, though tall, verged on the skeletal.
The tram's open boarding platforms exposed the crew to the elements. His winter attire, abandoning all pretence at accepted uniform, composed mainly of a knitted balaclava helmet in khaki, a pair of fingerless mitts (his bony, copper-blackened, fingers protruding like withered bindweed), a long tasselled scarf, and a pair of clogs designed for hill farming. The ill-fitting helmet swung from beneath his peak cap as if it were chain-mail, though partially secured by a pair of broken spectacles, the helmet's aperture framing a large aquiline nose that invariably supported a teetering dewdrop, quivering to the rhythm of the tram's bogies, verily, a Sword of Damocles to a sitting fare.
The school dinners of unremitting pom (ersatz potato), and for pudding, tepid sago with prunes, were never satisfying. Often I would be driven to spending my return fare on a teacake or two unwashed carrots at the local shops during my dinner hour.
Should the weather be fine after school at four o-clock, and having squandered my return fare, I would run home, my clogs echoing off the terraces. Sometimes my run would be delayed if the air-raid siren sounded and I would shelter under a railway bridge that spanned the road. I recall jagged shards of hot metal from anti-aircraft gunfire spinning over the granite setts to steam in the wet gutter.
But if the weather was wet, which it always seemed to be, I would board a tram and hide under the stairs whilst the conductor was upstairs collecting his fares. Eventually I would be found and put off, but at least I had reduced my run. On one occasion I slipped under the stairs and there beside me, propped up, was a little white coffin, the parents frowned at me from the lower deck, they would be going to the cemetery some stops up the line.
My main adversary was Old Balaclava. We came to know each other well. Never failing to check under the stairs, he would put me off at the next stop. Once I played my ace card, an Irish penny, King George V face up, but he turned it over to expose the harp. Off I went into the rain again, penny impounded. I could never win against Old Balaclava.
Early one morning as my parents were preparing to go to the mill, and I to school, my mother broke the news that she had heard that Old Balaclava had died in hospital from his injuries. His driver was killed on the night a bomb landed beside their empty tram as it approached the town's terminus, destroying the vehicle.
'Oh, good', I blurted, thinking of a life of prodigality with impunity. A resounding thwack around my ear quickly disabused me of that.
I am now, perhaps, older than Old Balaclava was at his sudden demise, and I'm left to wonder, when Armistice Day comes around again, 'Is there a poppy waiting to pair with a pin, for him?'
