Open Writing

Passing through the town of Newark-on-Trent and the village of Balderton, it was called London Road in those days, and numbered A1. It might not be the A1 now, but I think it's still called London Road.

In the early 1940s, there were very few motor vehicles. At least, not private cars. There were buses, some with wooden bench seats. There were convoys of camouflaged Army lorries. Sometimes they would pause on their journey to. . . we never knew where; it was a War secret. Careless talk costs lives. Soldiers came to sit on the hard wide footpath outside our house, leaning wearily on the front fence. That's where I first saw real live Americans. Ma would take cups of tea out to them. Tea, the perfect panacea.

The covered trucks carrying prisoners of war never stopped. We watched them speed by, the men with large bright X marks sewn onto the back of their shirts. Targets for shooting at, in case they tried to escape. I don't know why, but we boys believed them to be Italians. Perhaps they were being taken to work on nearby farms. Had we believed they were Germans, we would have been frightened. That's how things were, then.

And then there were the Amy tanks. The awesome tanks, in the wondering eyes of a small boy knowing there was a War on, but not really knowing why. Some crawled past on long low loaders. Others rumbled along under their own power. The tarmac surface of London Road suffered mightily when a few Shermans went by. Road repairers and blackened "tar men" were quite frequent visitors. All in a good cause.

Horse-drawn carts were common. The coal-man came with a huge old flat dray drawn by a Shire horse, wonderful creature. He hauled each heavy hessian sack of coal onto his back and plod-plodded noisily along the passage at the side of our house. It was a distinctive plod-clump, plod-clump, because he had a foot deformity of some sort. As a boy, I was taught not to stare, not to point, and not to ask.

The milk-man used a pony and trap for his deliveries. He would ladle milk from the churns, real old fashioned shiny churns, and bring it in a large jug to our back door. It would be ladled carefully in measured portions into the bowls Ma had put out to receive it. And then he would confide in Ma some tit-bit of gossip, just for her ears. Later in the day, Ma would compare notes with Mrs Raymond, two doors down. Of course, everyone's ears had heard his bit of confidential gossip. Even Mrs Kemp, no doubt, who was above that sort of thing.

The most colourful horse-drawn vehicles were the Gypsy wagons. Some plain and unadorned, not much more than carts. Others in the Pot-cart style, rounded tops covered with canvas covering. The Open-lot variety, rounded tops but with ornate timber roofing and panels. And the wonderful Reading, Ledge and Burton styles, those we think of as traditionally the Gypsy caravan with magnificent colourfully decorated timberwork along all walls. Glorious things, but not as traditional as popularly believed. They didn't come into use until the mid-1800s.

I loved them all, but Ma would bring me back indoors and lock the side gate. Very few shawl-clad peg-makers, lavender-sellers or fortune tellers ever got as far as our back door. I used to wonder why she seemed so fearful of them. Perhaps it was because, as I worked out later, we have Gypsy blood and she didn't want to be recognised by a long lost distant cousin? I don't know.

Now, nearly 70 years later, I look out of my front window and see too many parked cars. They all look the same. They don't belong here. They are a nuisance. They create driving hazards in this narrow crescent. Give me the traffic of London Road in the 1940s where, for better or for worse, everything belonged.

© Copyright Brian Barratt 2010