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Short Stories & Other fiction

The Valley

I remember taking my son up to my old bedroom. He must have been about three or four at the time. We lived in the country, and this was his first experience of a street. He looked out of the window, at the houses opposite, as far as the eye could see in either direction, separated from our side of the street by tiny yards with strips of garden and a cobbled road just wide enough for one vehicle. Not having a city vocabulary, he said “It’s a good view of the valley”.

That ‘valley’ was my playground, and the world didn’t extend much beyond. It led to another street, with the Co-op, and ‘The Main Road’ up which I walked a mile to school twice a day ~ without adult supervision. I also used to cross The Main Road to go to the paper shop on a Saturday tea-time for the local sports paper. I was so eager that I would be there, with a dozen or so football-mad boys and men, long before the newspapers arrived. Very occasionally, Dad would give me extra money for a quarter of Quality Street , which the five of us ate, as slowly as we could, during the evening.

We didn’t have TV in those days, so if it didn’t happen in The Street I didn’t know about it. We were all working-class, and there were no single-parent families, unmarried couples, gays, ethnic minorities, or long-term unemployed. We conformed to a very narrow definition of typical British families, although my parents must have had a rebellious streak. Every other door was stained or painted brown, but ours was pale green. Just as conspicuous was the woman who lived next-door-but-one; she had been divorced and was now living with her second husband. For all her dubious status, though, she must have been accepted, for occasionally my Dad used to take me to their house on Wednesday nights to watch Manchester United playing European cup matches in the pre-Munich days.

In Conformity Street it didn’t take much to stand out. There was a man (perhaps in his thirties) who lived with his parents. He seemed a nice chap, but he should really have been married, shouldn’t he? And lower down the street, one house was bathed in light every night from an arc-lamp, attracting moths from miles around. Without any comprehension of nature study as a hobby we thought it was a mad-cap activity. At the top of Our Street, at the head of the valley as it were, was a long-abandoned allotment, and this was as near to nature as we ever got. Straggling sycamores and buddleias had seeded themselves, and herb willow had taken over. The people in The Street were too orderly to use it for fly-tipping, and so it was a fairly safe place for kids to run wild.

The Street was a thoroughfare, but there was only one resident car. The proud owner had demolished his midden to make a parking space for it, and he spent every weekend on his back underneath it. I don’t remember the car being driven much. The only other vehicles that we saw were collecting rubbish or delivering. I don’t mean white vans with parcels from Amazon, but wagons delivering coal and milk, selling pop, or pies and peas. No polystyrene containers back then; if we wanted peas we took our own basin out to be filled. Two bottles of pop had to last us all week, dandelion & burdock and the exotically named American Cream Soda, perhaps, and when that was finished we had to drink Corporation pop (tap water).

The middens weren’t middens really, they contained the outside toilet and the coal bunker. In winter we put an oil lamp in the toilet to stop the water freezing, but it didn’t stop the seat from being pretty cold. The flat roofs provided a good play area, and you could jump from one house to the next across the narrow gateway. This activity was frowned upon, though as ‘showing off’ ~ standing up there for everybody to see. My favourite game was football, but we couldn’t play Attack & Defence (which we played at school) because inevitably the ball would go into someone’s back yard, and most of the neighbours didn’t like you going in to retrieve it. Some of them were actually hostile and, unlikely as it seems today, all the kids were scared of the old woman who lived next door. So we put a cardboard box in the middle of the street and this was our aim; not to blast the ball as hard as we could to score goals, but to lift it delicately with back-spin, a little chip shot, so that it dropped into the box without bouncing out. It was a skill that didn’t prove very useful when it came to the real thing. Likewise, French cricket with a tennis ball didn’t help me much when I had to face up to real cricket balls being hurled at me at Grammar school.

I also remember playing doctors and nurses with a girl who was a couple of years younger than me. Her grandma lived near the top of The Street and she had a small shed in her back-yard. The window had the obligatory lace curtain so we felt safe enough. We were so naive that we didn’t realise that we could put what I’d got into what she’d got, so we didn’t set up any deep-seated traumas. Just as well. With me being the elder (and the boy) I would have got the blame (or the prison sentence). The same girl lived more or less opposite me, and one night we realised we could communicate with each other by standing in our bedroom windows in our pyjamas. At least, I hope we were wearing pyjamas. It didn’t last long. From the kitchen windows downstairs my parents could see her and her parents could see me. Being cunning grown-ups they soon figured what was going on.

Something that didn’t get me into trouble was table football, or Subbuteo. Using the names of the clubs in the First Division, one of my friends developed complicated fixture lists and league tables, and we painstakingly played out matches over weeks and weeks to see which team finished top of the league. Another friend (from the madcap house) had a small snooker table. We would trail up the path in his yard, which was littered with dead moths, and put the snooker table on the kitchen table. Even with short cues, some of the shots were quite tricky as you tried to avoid the sink or the kitchen cabinet. Another skill that wasn’t needed when, as a teenager, I played on a full-size table in a dingy hall over Burtons .

Looking back on these times we talk about the community spirit, now lost, but I don’t remember The Street as a community. Perhaps it was too long for that. But we got to know families who lived near to us, and those with children my age, although the formalities of ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ were never dropped. Christian names were too intimate to be used in The Street. But one time when I had ventured away from home with my best friend (also from The Street) and we didn’t come back for tea, there was quite a large reception committee for us when we eventually turned up. Nothing was said, but the neighbours walked away shaking their heads, and our mums took us silently indoors to give us the telling-off we deserved. The only other occasions I can remember any kind of a street gathering was on Plot Night. The dads would build a bonfire, usually near to our house, blocking access completely. I don’t suppose anyone ever thought of notifying the police or putting up diversion signs, because no-one would have thought of driving down The Street on November 5^th. The fire got so hot that it used to melt the gas-tar between the cobbles and blister the paint on the gates to the nearest yards until we learned to cover them with old blankets. To get past the fire you had to flatten yourself against the wall and shield your face. The dads set off the fireworks and the mums brought out tea and coffee, and plot toffee, dark treacly stuff that locked your jaws into position. Perhaps it was peculiar to Our Street, but I never saw anyone drinking beer.

Many years later someone gave me the old slate street name sign, abandoned by council workmen when they replaced it with something more modern. I fastened it to the garage of my nice detached house in the country, where it looks out over the valley. Some things never change.