ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to Natalie Stead for the cover picture & illustrations throughout the book. She is a very talented young lady who can not only draw and paint, but also produce fabulous bespoke knitted, crocheted, and embroidered items. Find her on Instagram @natstead.

Huge thanks to my wife, Kim for her encouragement, proof-reading, editing, formatting and basically everything else required to produce this book.

A special mention to all my family and friends who have put up with regular updates on the progress of this project over the last couple of years, and who have promised to buy copies now that it is finally available.

Finally, thanks to all the characters in the book for their antics that made this publication possible.

The Early Years

(or A Tale of Two Titties)

I was born in the last month of the 1950’s. I don’t remember it, but I am assured that’s when it was, and the two titties were my mum’s; sustaining me day and night until the Cow & Gate formula milk came on the scene after a while.

The world I arrived in was just about over the austerity from the war, and before the threat of the Cold War. In fact, some bloke called MacMillan declared, You’ve never had it so good!

We lived in a 3-bed semi on a brand-new council estate situated in a quiet (then!) village in leafy Kent at the bottom of the North Downs.

Dad worked in a garage as a car salesman, so we always had a new car, and mum was at home looking after me and my 2-year older sister. Life was pretty good compared to a lot of others.

Apparently there’s a stigma attached to living on a council estate, even back then, but I would not realise this growing up until years later when I went to grammar school.  I still don’t understand the stigma as in the ‘50s and ‘60s most people rented their house either privately or via the council. As only banks lent money, and they were very strict with their lending criteria, it was just the well-off who could afford to actually buy. Many years later I managed to get a mortgage to buy a house without having a proper job or any proof of income – how times changed!

Looking back, some of the village was, and still is, middle and upper class. We used to have majors, captains, and people with proper double-barrelled names (Ponsonby-Smythe sort of thing), as opposed to the relatively modern trend of young women keeping their maiden names and sticking on their hubby’s name with a hyphen, so when it all goes tits up they still have their family name.

I suspect when our council estate was built in the ‘50s there was a bit of huffing and puffing amongst the villagers concerned about lowering the tone. Not half as much as in the ‘70s though, when they built a couple of new private estates that seem to be filled by Londoners who had been urged to move from ‘Sarf’ and East London with huge grants from the then GLC. All of a sudden our quaint Kentish accent was being modified with a Cockney twang.

Dear reader, you will have noticed already that I have the habit of digressing. I can’t help it. It occurs because as I write my mind thinks of something and I have to write it down there and then. So apologies, but it’s going to happen throughout the story.

Growing up on an estate with exactly 100 houses meant that there were always many children of a similar age to play with, and the estate was basically surrounded by fields, orchards, a stream, a lake and with just a moderate walk to get up on the North Downs. Even from an early age we were allowed to bugger off out to play as there was always a crowd of us, and one or two older ones to keep us in line. It wasn’t unusual during the holidays to leave the house after breakfast and not return until teatime.

Getting enough of us kids together to play football, rounders, cricket etc. was never a problem; word would go round the estate to meet on the playing field and hey presto, instant teams!

I seem to remember that I was the only one that had a proper leather football; yes, a proper one with laces that would cut your forehead open if you headed it wrong.  The reason I had the football was that my dad was a semi-professional footballer, having played for both Fulham and Charlton Athletic (albeit mostly in the reserves) for a short time as he injured both his knees; but he was still playing for Maidstone United who were in the heady depths of either non-league or fourth division in those days.

As you get older your memory gets very selective, hence I only remember fine summers days growing up. I have no recollection of being stuck indoors because it was pissing down, playing games or drawing. No, it was only fine weather throughout my childhood apart from The Great Flood of 1968 – more later).

Growing up where and when I did, I now realise was just about the best, though I didn’t always appreciate it at the time. Back in the day we were allowed almost complete freedom outside the house and the acres of downland with its own ruined Norman castle. This castle was completely ignored by historical societies until the last ten years or so, when they cleared all the shrubbery around it and opened it up as a visitor attraction, complete with car park and the obligatory signs telling you all about it. I remember it being almost completely buried in trees and bushes with only a few walls remaining, so was ideal for games of Robin Hood or the Knights of Sir Fuckaboutalot. I don’t remember a single occasion where one of the gang didn’t limp home with a grazed knee, or arm in a temporary sling from falling off the flint walls of the castle. No worries, once home out would come the ‘magic cream’ (Germolene) and all would be fixed.

If we weren’t doing that then we would be in the apple orchards scrumping, or just climbing trees and having apple fights. Did you know, if you impale an apple on the end of a long stick, you can throw it twice as far as you can by hand?

As I got to around eleven or twelve years old the games we played changed quite dramatically, they got quite grown up. For instance, we would make bows and arrows from Hazel branches, lay fifty yards apart and proceed to fire at each other. This progressed to homemade catapults firing marbles, culminating a few years later when we dressed up in heavy Parkas and fired air rifles at each other. How stupid were we? However, selective memory perhaps, but I only remember a couple of injuries, both of which happened to me. Firstly I got an arrow in the throat (I still have the scar to this day), then an air pellet in my leg which stayed there for several years until it worked its way to the surface and I cut it out with my Swiss Army Knife.

Robin Hood?

I mentioned catapults, and I have to say I was quite a good shot. It must be a genetic thing as my grandfather, who was a farm worker, used to erect the hop poles and strings wearing massive stilts about fifteen feet high so he could walk around the hop garden fixing the strings, always had a catapult in his pocket. When he spotted a rabbit hiding in the grass below him, he would shoot it to take home for dinner. He never missed, apparently.

Another change to the games we played was much more exciting and usually occurred behind the garage block, or sometimes inside one of the empty garages. In those days people actually used to put their cars away in a garage every night, and wash and polish them by hand every weekend. No automatic car washes or eastern Europeans on empty lots with pressure washers and chamois leathers back then.

There would be eight or ten of us; half boys, half girls, sitting on the floor of one of the garages. We had two different games we played; either ‘Dare/True Love/Kiss/Promise’, or the other one that didn’t have a name but basically involved the girls showing their pants (never the boys) for us to observe as they rotated slowly with their skirts hitched up.

I’m not sure if we actually cheated in the first game or we just didn’t know the rules. What was supposed to happen would be taking it in turns to choose one of the options for one of your mates, like; Fred, dare you to go and ring the doorbell of the miserable old scrote who lives at number 22. What inevitably happened was that whichever option was chosen would end up with you kissing one of the girls, hopefully not the ones with a mouthful of braces.

The second game was unofficially called, ‘Show us your bits’. We quite liked that game. Shame we all grew up and modesty took over.

Getting serious for a moment, we didn’t hear much about paedophiles or sex offenders back   then. I suspect there were as many around then as now, but without social media and the internet you never heard about such things, unless something happened to someone local. I do remember one chap getting caught with two young girls in his shed, making them pee in a jam jar. He mysteriously disappeared overnight to the North of England.

So now we have clarified that we weren’t budding sex offenders, just kids having a laugh (both boys and girls), we shall move on to other pursuits, some of which I now cringe about but at the time we didn’t think it so wrong.

‘Forty-Forty’, is the name of the best game ever, if you are 12; it involves someone being ‘It’ and an object like a tree or a particular garage door being ‘home’. ‘It’ closes their eyes and counts to forty while everybody else buggers off to hide. The object is to make it ‘home’ before getting caught by ‘It’ who has to come looking for everyone and run back to ‘home’ before you do, shouting forty- forty, Fred.  The cringey bit about this game is we used to play it in the graveyard, which was next to the estate, because the tombstones made numerous hiding places. Alas respect for the dead was not always present.

While I’m castigating myself for lack of respect, I confess that the churchyard was a handy source for daffodils on Mothers’ Day!  Well only until I had a Saturday job so I could afford to buy flowers. I think I may have redeemed myself a bit in later years, as on a couple of occasions I helped to mow the grass in the churchyard after the verger had been sacked (see peeing in jam jars earlier!).

‘Who Flung Dung’ is the name of the second-best game for twelve year olds. It’s a very simple game with few rules, but you do need a field with cows in order to play. You need about a four-foot-long whippy Hazel branch, or as we found by experiment, an old fishing rod. You stick the thin end of the stick/rod into the middle of a cowpat. Selection of the cowpat is critical; it must be two or three days old so it has a solid crust you can stick your stick in, but retaining a nice gooey underside.  You then bring the stick/rod back over your shoulder and swing it forward as if casting a fishing rod, whilst aiming at one of your mates shouting loudly, Flung Dung! so they have a chance to avoid a hit. If they get hit by the crispy side then a single point is scored. However it’s five points if you get them with the soft side, and usually the end of their game as they need to go home and wash the cowshit out of their hair. Oh, happy days.

Nice crispy ammo.

I mentioned earlier The Great Flood of 1968; what fun was had by most of us. From memory it rained non-stop for about a week, causing a usually tiny stream to entirely fill the valley next to the estate, and in fact caused the main A20 road to partially collapse where the stream ran under the road.

The low-lying houses were flooded up to the ground floor windows, but we were fine as we lived at the top of the hill.

We made the most of the flood, which lasted for several days. No school meant we had time to play around in the flood water in our rubber dinghy. I had another excuse for missing school too, as I was on crutches at the time, having had a greenstick fracture in my leg caused by playing footie and trying to emulate George Best, when Nobby Stiles (William) upended me. I thanked him afterwards though; when I did get back to school the teacher made a cushioned stool so I could put my leg up, and delegated a different girl every day to look after me while I was on crutches. Most disappointed that not one of the bitches would come to the toilet with me to help! Still, I suppose we were only eight at the time.

At the bottom of our hill was a junction where the three estate roads met, which flooded to a depth of about five feet. Enter my dad who announced that he was driving to the pub and no pissy little puddle at the bottom of the road was going to stop him. He was doing fine, floating gently across the puddle with his momentum from the downhill charge, until his Hillman Husky sprang a few leaks and sank. Some bright spark took a picture of my dad sitting on the roof of his car in the middle of the ‘puddle’ and the picture made it into the local paper. What an embarrassing pillock!

I was only trying to dip the headlights.

A few years later we entered into the world of commerce and high finance. Myself and a couple of mates snuck into our gardens and stole some carrots, onions, runner beans and anything that was growing at that time. We also raided my Nan’s allotment and sorted our booty into bundles. Then, with an old go-cart loaded with veg, we set off round the estate selling door-to-door. From memory it was quite successful. We certainly sold everything, and made a couple of quid each, which doesn’t sound much, but I used to get £1 a week for doing a paper round, seven days a week.

As we had now wiped out our unwitting veg suppliers, we had to come up with something new to sell. Over the next week or so we tried; firewood – not such a good seller as it was the middle of summer, earthworms for the fishermen on the estate – I think we only sold one pack, chores for the neighbours, like shopping trips for 10p, or a bit of weeding for 50p. Finally, the masterstroke that would have made our fortune had it not been such hard work; car washing at 50p a go. We made enough to buy some new fishing tackle, so went fishing instead of washing cars.

Fishing on the local river was the favourite pastime. This small river, about twelve feet wide at the widest, held a nice variety of wild fish, some very large for the size of river. I recall the biggest brown trout being about 3 lbs, Bream about 5 lbs, and similar sized Chub.

As we were just kids and mucked about