Pigs might...float In the school holidays we would be out playing all day and would walk for miles around the countryside. One other thing we used to do was go to Chester Street railway bridge to watch the trains coming through the floods.
Below this bridge is where Tesco is today. This was the old Railway Station and we used to watch the trains come through the water which would be at least a foot deep here.
There were times when this water was up to the level of the Station platform, and lower down in the Chester direction perhaps a quarter of a mile from the rail bridge was a field where a man used to keep a few pigs.
Time and time again I have seen this field flooded and the pigs floating about!
The original Granville
At the age of 12 or 13 I managed to obtain an after-school job delivering groceries from a branch of the CO-OP which opened on Clay Lane, Mold. It went on to become a veterinary surgery. This CO-OP was run by a Miss Jones with an assistant named Almeda.
I was the second boy to hold this job but at my age and still in school it was ideal, and of course it paid 10 shillings a week. This I paid to my mother and I was allowed to keep any tips which some weeks could total as much as two shillings. When I had finished deliveries on a Saturday, and weighed out perhaps a full sack of potatoes into 5lb bags, Miss Jones would come into the back with my 10 shillings in an envelope and five Woodbines cigarettes in a paper packet for now I had started smoking!
I must add that these deliveries were made by me carrying them in a big wicker basket all around Mold. After about a year of this they bought a delivery bike - and what contraptions they were. It had a very large carrier on the front that could take two enormous boxes of groceries and a carrier on the back to take one smaller box of groceries. But when fully loaded it was almost uncontrollable, but at least it more than halved the time that I was out delivering. If you ever watched the TV show Open All Hours and saw Granville on his shop bike then you know what I mean!
Playing on the tip
As children of perhaps eight years old we would spend many hours at the rubbish tip in Mold. This received all the town's household waste which, when I think back, was not much as there were only two very small lorries to collect it.
One I remember driven by a Mr Morgan who lived about 40 yards from our house and, during the school term, when he finished his lunch for which he came home daily, we would run behind it and jump up to grab the top of the tailboard and we could hang on for grim death and ride like this up to Wrexham St.
This lorry had a wind up back for tipping. It had no hydraulics and an open body so if you happened to be behind it on a windy day you had your eyes filled with ash.
Another person was Ned. He, I remember, looked after the tip and I remember he had a horse and cart for travelling to and from his work. The tip, on occasion, went on fire and then it could burn for weeks. It was then dangerous as it would burn underneath leaving a thin crust on top through which you could fall and get burned and more than one child did - though nothing fatal. I remember after one big fire they had to cut massive trenches across the tip to put out the fire.
The tip was not only a play area, it was our 'horn of plenty' so to speak. If ever we wanted to make anything it was our storehouse.
If we decided to make a wooden truck, this was done by going to the tip and finding an old pram, removing the wheels and axles, finding a plank of wood, reclaim some nails from old boxes, straightening them for re-use and make a truck.
This was simply a plank 4 or 5 feet long with a wheel in each corner the front axle was made to pivot and we steered with a piece of rope tied to each end of this axle.
When made, a truck could be used for many things. Neighbours would ask you to take things to the tip or to the yearly bonfire, such as old armchairs. You could move coke, logs, and more than once we'd bring home the horse muck off the street for the garden.
You could also bring home people's weekly shopping in a large box and even take around our Guy Fawkes on bonfire night asking for a "penny for the guy". All these tasks would earn us a few coppers to go to the pictures.
We could also make up a pushbike by salvaging parts from the tip at Mold. One day you would perhaps find a wheel, next week a frame, then perhaps a seat -although we often used the foot of an old wellington for this!
You would hide these parts in the bushes until you had a basic bike - no brakes of course, these were for posh people! And at times you could manage without a front tyre.
I also remember one day whilst we were playing on the tip that a van drew up and a man opened the back and threw out an old motorbike in bits. I remember whilst us lads were draging all these parts off the tip another man came along and took it off us.
That motorbike was back on the road within a month. I well remember it was a plum colour with a square tank, and the gear change was on the tank. So much for our town tip, it was a place where we spent half of our childhood.
Bitter winter of '47
We had a very severe winter in 1947. I well remember the very deep snow, and one memory of it sticks in my mind never to be forgotten. It was the day my father took me down the lower area of Gas Lane to a house that was being built for the manager of the gas works. This house was almost completed and my father knew the joiner and I think the objective was to come away with sticks for lighting our fire at home.
How we managed to reach there I do not know because the snow was up to my waist and I was trying to follow in father's footsteps and when we finally did reach this house the joiner was upstairs with a nice big fire in the grate.
Again I well remember it because I sat at the top of the stairs pulling the hard packed snow from down my wellingtons and throwing it down the stairs to an open front door.
At this age (seven or eight) it was my job every Sunday morning to go with my father to our town refuse tip which was only about a quarter of a mile from our house and sift through the rubbish picking out the cinders for our fire at home.
This did not take much time because every house had coal fires in them days and ashes made up the bulk of people's rubbish. Their paper and packaging was mostly salvaged for recycling. Quickly we filled two small sacks of cinders, rested them on an old push bike and pushed them home. This was always done by about 7.30am in summer months.
It was later in winter and my hands would be frozen. It was at this age I was taught to be mindful of the needs of home and after being out with my friends playing all day we would all drag an old branch off a tree home to be sawn up for the fire. And we would salvage anything that would burn.
Christmas orange
At Christmas I remember that toys were handed down having been given a lick of paint and most girls would have a home-made rag doll, but one thing we looked forward to was our yearly orange - yes, one a year at Christmas. They always seemed to get a boat-load in for Christmas - at this point I might say that it was a couple of years after the War before I saw my first banana - and about twice a year we would take to school a jam jar and we were issued with a measure of Cocoa powder with a small amount of sugar mixed with it. Of course we all arrived home with cocoa around our mouths trying to deny that we had pinched some.
Plague of boils
As a young boy I never seemed to be free from a boil for long, always on your neck and sometimes on your face. They say it was something lacking in our diet, but I do not think so. I don't think we get them today because of the antibiotics that are fed to the animals we eat and we receive it through the food chain.
Rituals and customs
We would go to the top of Bromfield Park to an engineering company by the name of RS Davies, at 10am prompt. We would knock on his office door and he would open it and in unison us kids would chant, 'Happy New Year Mr Davies. Calennig please'.
At this point he would proceed to hand out a shiny sixpence to each child, but to receive one you had to live in Bromfield Park and he knew us all, but to Robert and John Whitley he would give a shilling each because they were twins - it made us jealous. Rumour had it that Mr Davies was a millionaire. This was just at the end of the War.
Whilst I write about Calennig, we also used to go around the houses once a year our faces blackened with soot; a small branch of a bush with paper streamers hanging from it in our hands knocking on people's doors and when they opened their door we would proceed to jig about and sing. What or where this custom came from I do not know but I do know it would gain us a few pence to spend. I suppose people thought it was worth it for a laugh.
Food for thought
Times were very hard and as food was rationed most people grew a lot of their own food in their garden in reply to the Government posters of the day, Dig For Victory. We were no exception.
My father grew many things but the bulk of his crop was potatoes because our family was made up of Mam, Dad, three sisters, myself, and two brothers of which one was in the Forces fighting the war, the other was only a baby who was born in 1944.
My father was unfit to go into the Forces due to a club foot so, at the time, he worked at the bomb factory at Rhydymwyn, just outside Mold.
His father, my grandfather, lived about 500 yards from us in Alexander Road. He used to be the blacksmith at the Gasworks in Gas Lane, Mold, this again was about 500 yards from us in the opposite direction. At the back of his house he had a large pigeon loft housing dozens of pigeons and I well remember on the odd occasion having roast pigeon as meat in our meal.
Another item was wild rabbit which someone in the locality would capture with a snare or with a ferret and nets and would charge as little as six pence old money (two and a half pence in today's value) and this would make a huge pan of stew, enough to feed the whole family.
Another type of stew my mother made was called jot. This was made with bacon scraps, potatoes cut like today's crisps, only thicker, and an onion, not much in the way of taste but very filling and welcome in the winter.
One other favourite which I greatly enjoyed for supper was a basin of bread and milk which was very filling. A further item was called wartime cake which was made without any fat or butter.
War's over
I remember my father getting me out of bed and taking me out to the centre of Bromfield Park which had a small island in the middle of the road (now removed) to join all the people singing and dancing, and I remember them bringing a piano from the home of Doris Davies at the top of the park and she played it.
The celebrations went on for hours - and as my birthday is on Victory in Europe Day - I also remember soon afterwards my father taking us up the town at dusk to see for the first time in my life shop and street lights without blackouts, or any restrictions whatsoever. To me, a small child, it was a wonderful sight.
Rag, bone and my bloody legs!
The rag and bone man would give us one-day-old chicks in return for cloths. As I have said earlier times were very hard and our footwear was mainly clogs which were OK, except in the winter when the snow used to pack tight under the sole and you would end up as if you were walking on stilts.
I remember Mam unpicking collars off one shirt to sew on to another shirt and trying her best to keep me tidy. My mother used to make trousers not only for me but for neighbours' children out of old overcoats.
When all the cutting and sewing was done the scraps were cut up and used to make what we called Peg Rugs. These were made with a hessian sack which was cut open, washed, then cut to the shape required.
Then having cut up the odd scraps of clothing to pieces - about one inch wide and five inches long - you had a sharpened stick about eight inches long with which you proceeded to push the sharp end through the weave of the sack and follow it with a strip of cloth.
It was a boring, thankless job but we all had to muck in to get it done. One other use for a hessian sack was to have one tied around the waist for an apron and many people wore these aprons.
Whilst I write about sacks I must mention flour sacks. If you were lucky enough to get a couple from a bake house they, being made of cotton, would be unpicked at the seams and stood in a bath of bleach overnight to remove the printing on the sack and then they were sewn up into a pair of curtains and dyed to give them colour.
Items of cloth that could not be recycled were kept on one side for the rag and bone man who used to come around periodically.
In return for a bundle of rags we would receive as many as six one day old chickens which were all males which we kept in one of the drawers near the fire to help keep them warm.
These were fed on household scraps and when big enough were kept in a small shed in the garden and they had free range of the garden during daylight.
I remember two being kept for Christmas dinner. This was the only time you had chicken and it was a luxury. These two were white cockerels, one short and fat, the other was thinner but with very long legs. It looked like an ostrich and it could run like one - there was no escape! - and to a cockerel there is nothing nicer than trying to peck a few lumps out of a small boy's leg.
I could not go through the door without a battle and at the time I must have been second best in Wales at the 100-yard dash but this cockerel was the best for three months - until two days before Christmas!
