FOSSE ROAD DAYS

A memoir of childhood  during the 1950s and  ‘60s in the Fosse Road North area of Leicester

I was kind of an only child – kind of because an elder sister had only survived birth by a few days; and kind of because, by the age of ten, I had accumulated two sisters and a brother via my mother’s new husband, but Rina, Neil and Lorraine were all too young for me to play with properly.  

Mum had split up from my father when I was five and it’s hard to remember those early years when I lived on Haddenham Road off the main Narborough Road. I do recall quite vividly however, being terrified out of my wits as a toddler (and suffering nightmares for years afterwards) by a couple of older boys wearing ghost hoods - pillowcases with eye-holes cut out, which, in retrospect, must have made them look like dwarf Ku Klux Klan. I also remember a strange old lady who went walking with her dog: she did the walking whilst pulling along a little trolley on which was attached her macabre ex-pet, a stuffed dog.

Speaking of trolleys, some kids still had home-made ones at that time – the sort of crude, orange-crate contraptions which feature in Bill Naughton’s short story, ‘Spit Nolan’ – but their day was passing and I never had one myself. Mum said I was mad about cars and I know from photographs that I had a cowboy suit with a gun-belt and matching pistols. The interest in cars which, back then in the 1950s, were distinctive shapes and styles, soon faded and, in fact, I’ve never even bothered to learn how to drive since, but the fascination with the Wild West has never really left me.

My childhood coincided with the heyday of TV ‘horse operas’: The Lone Ranger, Gun Law, Cheyenne, Wells Fargo, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Bronco, Laramie, Bonanza - to name but some of those I followed avidly, along with the already outdated likes of Hopalong Cassidy which featured on the Saturday matinee serials at The Fosse Cinema. We’d gallop out of the grand art deco façade and down the steps (since demolished to make way for an utterly nondescript Tesco Express), imaginary reins in one hand, slapping our imaginary horses with the other in between loosing off shots – peeyow! peeyow! – at imaginary Indians whilst racing and whooping away around the terraced streets or up the hill to the park.
      
A key film in this genre around that time was ‘The Magnificent Seven’ which my Uncle John took me to see at The Roxy. I can remember, during those early visits to ‘the pictures’, being fascinated by the pall of cigarette smoke hanging illuminated in the flickering beam of the projector. Later, as we walked back up Imperial Avenue to Hallam Crescent where I used to stop with my Grandma in those days,  John, who was a raffishly Brylcreemed, extrovert character, vocalised Elmer Bernstein’s terrific theme music at the top of his voice (‘Dadaladaladalad…’) in between drags of Park Drive Plain all the way home. I loved that theme and imagined it accompanying my games of Cowboys & Indians. A few years later, Ennio Morricone’s music for Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti westerns’ starring Clint Eastwood  replaced it in my affections. ‘The Good, The Bad & The Ugly’ is still my favourite western – but by the time that came out, I’d grown out of romping around on fantasy stallions.

Long before then though, as a small boy often confined to bed with bronchitis, I would play with a rather surreal mixture of matchbox vehicles, building blocks, a train set, a model fort and a motley selection of plastic figures of varying sizes, some of them mounted on horseback and including farmyard animals and dinosaurs. I would while away hours creating scenarios around the eiderdown and bedroom floor and furniture. I was quite happy on my own and always able to amuse myself. Many years later, reading fairy tales and nursery rhymes to my own children, I was struck by how similar I was to the often solitary - but not lonely - little boy who figures in many of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems for children.

I’m of that last, fortunate generation of children who were allowed to play out in the streets and parks before the understandable fear of much increased traffic rose up alongside the paranoia of ‘stranger-danger’. We had moved to Fosse Road North when I was five or six. It is a road with an ancient and noble history, part of the original Fosse Way and dating back to Roman times. From the age of seven, I was trusted to catch the bus along the Fosse and Buckminster Roads up to Alderman Richard Hallam Primary School (not that I often did actually travel by bus – the penny fare usually went on sweets while I went on foot). Being an early reader, I would also toddle down to Woodgate Library on my own each week and wander around its musty shelves seeking out the latest adventures of Billy Bunter and William Brown.


(Picture 1: The house where I lived on Fosse Road North, three doors up from the Methodist Chapel where I occasionally and unenthusiastically attended Sunday School. The youth club was briefly fashionable though c. 1965 / 66 when it put on local pop groups. I remember seeing Mozzletoff there and The Farinas - who later evolved into none other than Family. A shilling at the door and soft drinks only. Presumably there were a couple of quite hip Christians in the congregation back then, who booked the bands, but it didn’t last. I wonder if Mozzletoff was a Jewish outfit?).

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that those stories took place in settings far removed from my own urban, working-class background, I simply adored them, re-reading all of the books several times over. Looking back, I think the upper-class, public school Bunter and the rural, middle-class William were almost as important to me as my real friends.

Out in the streets, my early friends were the neighbourhood kids who would gather, sometimes in groups of up to about a dozen. As far as I can recall, most of the games involved both boys and girls: British Bulldog, Hopscotch, Tick, Hide & Seek were all regular on parade as well football and cricket. My back alley came out on the Empire and Mantle Roads where the high redbrick walls of Fosse Secondary Modern (which I would later attend), stood, providing useful space for goalposts and wickets to be chalked up.

The boys however, didn’t go in much for skipping or juggling balls up against walls, whilst the girls never seemed very taken with either Marbles, Snobs or the various versions of a game that involved flicking cigarette cards that usually featured pictures of famous footballers and cricketers or film and pop stars). In one version of this, the aim was to knock over your opponent’s cards which were placed slanting between wall and pavement by flicking your own cards from where you knelt four or five feet away. You got to keep those cards of his you knocked down, then he would have his turn. In the other version, you would take alternate flicks, drifting the cards so that they landed flat on the ground and try to cover the opponent’s cards and, by so doing, claim them for your own.   

I don’t recall the names of the games with the cards (‘Flick’, perhaps) or quite how we acquired our dog-eared collections which were usually held together in packs with elastic bands. I think some may have come from actual cigarette packets and others from packets of bubblegum bought from Bailey’s sweet shop on the corner of the Mantle and Battenberg Roads. The cigarette cards featuring sports, film and pop stars were being replaced by coupons which adults collected by the thousand and redeemed for products out of glossy catalogues. This gimmick was a boon to the tobacco industry as people wheezed away enthusiastically on their Players No. 6 and Embassy, saving up thousands of coupons to buy an electric kettle or a new set of saucepans. It was a practise similar to that of collecting ‘milk-checks’ from the Co-Op or petrol coupons from the garage - only much more injurious to the nation’s health!

How fitting, incidentally, for a sweet shop to be located on the corner of Battenberg Road! As far as I recall, Bailey’s, was ideally placed to function as a school tuck shop to Fosse Secondary, and traded as a specialist sweet shop. Apart from the usual selection of chocolate bars and crisps, the rather aged and diminutive Mr.& Mrs. Bailey would pick out the sickly-sweet treats by hand or shovel measures of them of from big glass jars and plastic boxes. These ‘penny sweets’ as they were called - although some were even cheaper than that – no doubt packed with teeth-rotting colourants and e-numbers - were poured into little paper bags for hordes of impatient kids enriched with the pennies, half-pennies and, if they were lucky, ‘thruppenny-bits’ and ‘tanners’ that had been burning holes in their pockets.

(Picture 2: The corner of Battenberg and Mantle Roads where Bailey’s sweet shop used to be. My old secondary school, now the Fosse Neighbourhood centre, a lovely  warren of arts and crafts with a library, is on the right).

And oh, the multi-coloured joys to be had there! Rainbow Sherbet (which we called ‘kayleye’); Liquorice Strings that came in red, black, yellow and brown; Flying Saucers fashioned from pastel shades of rice paper and full of  zingy, sugary stuff; small, square, black toffees in black and white checked wrappers called Blackjacks; orange spiral sticks of Barley Sugar; Pear Drops; Aniseed Balls; Gob Stoppers; Sherbet Dabs…and, if it was hot - cheap lollipops made from lemonade or dandelion and burdock; Mivvies – the more expensive lollies with ice-cream inside; Ice Poles - and not forgetting those wonderful triangular chunks of frozen orange juice that you used to suck from its sticky wrapper. It was called Jubbly and would numb and stain your face (with a raspberry equivalent called Jungle Juice).

There were also two fish ‘n’ chip shops nearby: one (still going) strategically facing what used to be The Fosse Cinema and another on Tudor Road. We preferred the latter because the owner was a good-natured soul who would give us a bag of batter- crackling for free if he was in the mood and wasn’t too busy.

We didn’t receive very much pocket money in those days although it did tend to go a long way. Not long enough, of course, and we were always looking to supplement our income by doing occasional and seasonal work such as Bob A Job (not that any of us were in the Cubs or Scouts - too much like school!); guying in the weeks leading up to Bonfire Night; carolling at Christmas; leaf-clearing in the autumn; snow-clearing in the winter; and, as I mention elsewhere, selling rags. I know it’s all proportional, but I’m often amazed at the amount of cash parents hand out to their kid these days. No wonder it’s often said that youngsters today know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

If you were lucky, you managed to get a Paper-Round. I never had one myself but, during my last year at school, I rode a delivery-bike for a Tudor Road shop which stocked materials for painting and decorating. Three or four afternoons a week after school, I would pedal off with a list to the local wholesalers and collect rolls of wallpaper, packets of paste and tins of paint precariously piled in the basket of the bike. Once I had to brake suddenly and the lot tumbled out on to the road. A can of brilliant white gloss broke open and splashed in a great splurge down the middle of the road. It didn’t help that this accident took place almost directly outside the shop which employed me. Not the greatest advert and shortly afterwards I was relieved of the job and the princely sum of fourteen shillings that it had paid me - 14/-d = 70p per week in modern money…

Speaking of bikes, I don’t think I had a two-wheeler until I was about eleven. It was bought second-hand from a shop on the corner of Fosse Road North and Stephenson Drive for around £4. Several years before I’d briefly tootled along on a ‘trike’ but, after working up a rare head of speed, had crashed into the pillar-box by the chippie on Fosse Road. The machine was ‘written off’, as were my chances of convincing Mum that I could be trusted on three wheels, let alone two.

Later, though, biking greatly extended the orbit of our travels and my friends and I would toil away up the seven miles of hill to Bradgate Park - as much for the return journey downhill as for the delights of the park itself. We’d occasionally go out to Kirby Castle and both directions along the canal towpath, but not all routes were as straightforward as those and most of the time we contented ourselves with less exacting trips. We’d race around the blocks of neighbouring terraces, safe in the knowledge that most of the traffic either parked or on the move would be few and far between.
Some of the highest points in the city were in the vicinity and we‘d push up the hills of Sandhurst Road and Burnham, Heacham and Parker Drives on foot just to come flashing back down in the saddle. The trouble with bikes though, was that they needed maintaining –  tyres burst, gears stuck, brakes failed and chains came off - and none of us were much inclined towards oiling and repairs.

Playing out in the streets was a natural stage in children’s development back then. Occasionally a parent would pop out to have a check but I think the general assumption was that adults would keep an eye on kids. Not many mums worked in those days and they would often be out and about pushing prams containing baby brothers and sisters down to the local shops (apart from the corner-shops, we were well provided for in our area with a Co-op and the Beatrice Road precinct within a couple of minutes’ walk). The mums would issue warnings to us older ones to ‘behave yourselves and watch the roads’. Understandably, such warnings were not always strictly adhered to, but perhaps children in those days developed common-sense a bit earlier than now. In any case, there was a locked blue telephone box on the main Fosse Road North where the local bobby would check in along his beat, so we were always wary of a dark, awe-inspiring, helmeted figure appearing around the corner.

Having said that, it must be pointed out, that it wasn’t a period much characterised by consciousness of health and safety issues. I recall one hot summer around 1960 when there was a craze for the sort of cheap plastic magnifying glasses often found amongst the gimmicks and e-numbers in ‘Lucky Bags’. For a while, the kids in my neighbourhood were obsessed with sitting in the road, coaxing up black bubbles of tar from a carefully trained glass and waiting avidly for the satisfying splat when the bubble burst. Around the corner, steady streams of traffic flowed back and forth along Fosse Road, mainly lorries and buses, but apart from the odd delivery van, you would rarely be troubled by cars in the back streets.

Quite a few young boys back then carried pen-knives – not as weapons, I hasten to add, but to whittle away on bits of wood and experiment with the various blades and tools. You lived in hope of one day being called upon to remove a stone from a horse’s hoof, but alas that day never came. Instead, you would practise throwing it at trees on the park or playing Stretch. This was a game which would probably horrify most modern parents. The idea was for two boys to face each other three or four feet apart on the grass. You started with your feet together and aimed to throw your knife no more than six inches away from your opponent’s right or left foot. Your throw only counted if the knife stuck in the ground properly and if it was roughly in the six inch limit. The other boy would then move his foot to where the knife was sticking and then take his turn. The goal was to eventually stretch your opponent so wide that he collapsed and you, therefore, were proclaimed the winner.   

Occasionally a ball went through a window and pocket-money was withdrawn, or a fight would have to be broken up and you’d be kept indoors for a few days but, in the main, the level of trust that parents invested in their young proved not to be misplaced. A certain level of trespassing, however was regarded  - especially by boys – as an irresistible adventure and I’m afraid a number of gates, walls and fences were climbed by the likes of me and my best friends - the brothers George and Chris Smith and Geoff Huwlett – very much in the spirit of William Brown and his Outlaws. The defences of the allotments around the Fosse Road North and Groby Road junction proved to be easily breached and ‘scrumping’ expeditions for apples were often mounted there. Wild blackberries were more common then too but they were considered public property and therefore gathering them lacked the illicit thrill of the forbidden fruit in the allotments.

(Picture 3: On the right, the alley and House where George and Chris Smith lived. On the left, the Empire Road entry to what used to be the Co-Op Stables).

The alley to the Smith brothers’ house backed on to a stables and stockyard of the Co-Op which came out on Battenberg Road. In between lay a land of adventure with long, sloping ramps leading up to an upper floor with secret views over the back- yards of Mantle Road. The place had fallen into disuse by the time we were big enough to summon up the nerve to explore it. I can however, still recall quite clearly hearing the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on early mornings in the late 1950s. The old man used to go out with a brush and pan to collect horse-shit to sprinkle around the few flowers our back garden could accommodate. It was the only nurturing I can ever recall him managing.

(Picture 4: The other entry to the stables on Battenberg Road as it is now. The space houses several small businesses. There aren’t many of those wall-painted signs left nowadays).

The nearest thing to a disaster happening on those streets that I can recollect was one Bonfire Night when the wooden telegraph-pole on the corner of Empire and Mantle Roads caught alight and had to be put out by the fire service. There were several unofficial bonfires in the area apart from that one, including a couple off Tudor Road but the biggest one was always built at the bottom of Stephenson Drive on the raised patch of wasteland (now a small playground) by the railway bridge that crossed Fosse Road. This may not have been an official site but it had become a tradition and was zealously guarded by Old Ma Derbyshire, whose several sons went to Fosse School over the years. She was a squat, gap-toothed harridan in apron and turban, a notorious but popular figure around the local shops such as Grocer Hodge’s where the local mothers would gather to be ‘geed up’ by the proprietor, a cheeky chappie in the Max Miller vein. She regarded it her sacred duty to protect the ‘Stevo Bonny’ from premature incineration and would chase off potential arsonists with an impressive volley of abuse whilst brandishing her trusty yard-brush.

(Picture 5: The site of the old ‘Stevo Bonny’, now a toddlers’ playground, with Fosse Road North bridge on the right in its modern guise as a thoroughfare for cyclists and pedestrians. That old stone wall afforded us hours of pleasure scrambling up and down it as very small boys. The gap at the right end which provided a handy foothold is still there half a century on!).

Apart from games of Cowboys & Indians, World War II exercised a powerful influence over the minds of young boys, even fifteen years or so after it had ended. This fascination was stimulated by films and sets of toy soldiers but, perhaps more importantly, by the boys’ comics of the day, such as The Lion and The Eagle which always ran war stories, often serialized in comic strip form, sometimes in prose. Thinking back, those games of soldiers and the WildWest, were just more sophisticated versions of the various Chase and Hide & Seek games that all kids played almost from the moment they could walk. Both versions however, created a vast imaginative canvas of context and jargon which provided an outlet for all that pre-pubescent testosterone that was beginning to surge through us boys.

Our idea of war was made considerably more colourful by palling up at junior school with an American boy who was at ‘Dicky Hallam’ Juniors briefly. His father was in the military and he lived in a ‘posh’ semi on Buckminster Road which had a real garden (as opposed to the pokey back yards most of us came from). Some of us were invited round to play a few times and were amazed at the lavish snacks that his mother laid on. The real attraction though, was the boy (whose name I don’t recall) and his cool clothes, haircut and wildly glamorous American accent. I can still hear him exhorting us to ‘Hit the dirt!’ on his back lawn as he directed us in his own version of the Normandy landings.

The school playgrounds, streets and parks were our battlefields and prairies. Most of us had toy pistols or rifles, bows and arrows, catapults and pea-shooters, and if you hadn’t, then an imaginative substitute could soon be improvised from bits of wood and branches. Imaginary horses could soon be transformed as if by magic into imaginary jeeps or tanks and, of course, pebbles made for very convincing grenades –especially when accompanied by whistles and onomatopoeic verbal explosions – which, unfortunately, defy printed representation. Running along or crouching behind the walls of the palisaded terraces on Fosse Road North, or chasing around the corners and in and out of the alleys of Battenberg, Empire, Mantle, Paget and Tudor Roads, we were posse and bandits, commandos and storm troopers.

When we tired of the microcosm of those few little streets (not that Tudor Road can be classed as ‘little’ – it is apparently one of the longest terraced streets in England - we could move our wagon train or whole Theatre of Operations to Fosse Park or The Rally. At that time, The Rally was little more than a stretch of waste ground with a disused train-track and derelict air-raid shelters laying between Tudor Road and the Grand Union Canal – which, of course, made it a perfect backdrop for small scale re-enactments of The Battles Of the Bulge or Little Big Horn.

(Picture 6: The weir by The Rally with Pigotts’ scrap merchants top right where we played our humble part in the rag trade. Obviously still a nice place to relax these days…).

For a while, when the area at the back of Anstey Lane near the Alderman Richard Hallam junior school was being redeveloped, we would play on the transitional ground which was known by us as The Sand Hill, so called because of its quite steep rise of sandy soil dug out by the excavators when clearing the site. This hill was like a mountain to us and several rough slides had been established by children – much steeper and faster than the ‘baby ones’ on the playgrounds of neighbouring parks. It was a thrilling wilderness for small boys - full of weeds and bushes, in our minds it was Monument Valley and the Sahara Desert rolled into one. Sometimes there were ponies tethered there which we would try to mount by teetering atop of a few of the stray house-bricks which lay around. Fortunately, our attempts were always unsuccessful and the placid ponies would simply shrug us off and edge away.  

Another exciting wilderness which I would occasionally explore was the The City Farms which ran alongside Beaumont Leys Lane. My cousin Michael who was a year or two older than me would occasionally deign to take me over the farms when I was visiting his family who lived near the top of the Lane. The place was a bit too far out of the territory of our Fosse Road gang for us to know it well, and I wouldn’t have been able to find my way around without Mick (as he preferred to be called). The ‘Farms’ no longer resembled anything agricultural but was a wonderland of sloping, wooded paths and dens made by the local kids. There was a tree-swing overhanging a small quarry which was guaranteed to get your adrenalin rushing. 
                                           
Now I think back, we were spoilt for choice when it came to playgrounds: apart from Fosse, there were also the Abbey and Western Parks within walking and, later, biking distance. My frequent sojourns at my Grandma’s meant that Braunstone Park was also within my reach. I really did spend a large and significant part of my childhood on those parks and it gave me an enduring love of urban green areas. Whenever I travel, home or abroad, I always try to seek out the local parks. These days, in this country, I’m always struck and saddened by the absence of children on parks. I guess the comfort of central heating and the convenience of computers is pretty seductive; after all, modern kids are only a few clicks away from a seemingly endless range of fantasy worlds enhanced by amazing graphics. It’s a shame though, that they ‘don’t get out more’, as the saying goes - and really use that faculty that I keep coming back to in this piece: the imagination.

Fosse Park may not have been blessed with the sheer size of the bigger parks - and it had none of the sandpits or paddling pools that were a feature of parks in those days – but it did possess the advantage of being nearby. I could walk there in less than five minutes and it was a meeting-place not only for close friends but ‘mates’ who’d we’d hook up with to play football and cricket - step up the O’Flynn brothers, Paul ‘Wally’ Walters and more too numerous to mention (a mention here for some friends from the streets who I don’t really associate with the parks, maybe because I don’t recall them being very sporty: Steve Poole, Gez Simpson and his mate John).

There was a long, sloping line of O’Flynn siblings, but the two I knew best were Paddy and Jim. After leaving school they both became star players around the pubs in the Table-Skittles leagues but, as kids, it is Pad’s bold and zany, second-generation Irish humour and Jim’s elegance as a footballer that I remember most clearly. ‘Ginner’(a corruption of ginger), as Jim was known due to the colour of his hair, was a tall, skinny, laconic youth who moved with a languid grace and close control of the ball, drifting through defences, stroking pinpoint passes hither and thither and often trickling goals a’la Denis Law past bewildered keepers. He rarely seemed to run or break sweat and reminded me of Spurs’ John ‘The Ghost’ White and, a little later, of Brazil’s strolling midfielder, Gerson. The barrel-chested, lantern-jawed Wally was more of a rugger type but he’d often play cricket with us, mercilessly putting bowlers to the sword left, right and centre. Despite his size and strength, I remember his sweet disposition and he never seemed to get into fights – fortunately for the rest of us.

Epic games of up to twenty a side would evolve from more conventional beginnings. Heaps of coats provided goalposts and the wheels of upended bikes passed as wickets. Wheels were wider than stumps and it was always satisfying as a bowler to thud a tennis ball between the spokes where it often would stick, ruling dispute out of the question. These games sometimes took place after school but more often on Saturdays (if Leicester City were playing away) and Sundays. Incidentally, we were usually in the crowd at Filbert Street if there was a home fixture and sometimes even attended reserve games. There were never any referees on Fosse Park though, or umpires and naturally some hot arguments ensued but, generally a kind of democracy of common sense prevailed. Due to its more formal, stop-start and time-consuming nature, cricket was more of a challenge but single-innings games could usually be completed reasonably well.

Rugger was never played on the park – being a grammar school game, it was beyond our experience. The deputy-head at Fosse, a Mr.Coulsey did once try to establish a school side but, as I recall it, this project was abandoned after – well, during, actually – the first inter-school match when matters degenerated into even more of a running brawl than the official sport tends to be.


(Picture 7: The Fosse Secondary Modern Football XI, 1963-64 - Back row l-r - Yours Truly, Rob Pears, John Winterton, Trev Coley, Julian Phipps, Dave Smith, Pat Daley. Front row l-r - Martin Whale, Geoff Hulett, Ray Wheelband, Steve Geary, Paul Botterell, Paul Nelmes, Percy Ishmael.

I'm grateful to my old mate Geoff Hulett for emailing this shot to me from South Africa where he has lived for many years. His sister came across this blog and put him on to it. Thus was a friendship from 45 years ago renewed). 

I was a pretty solid sportsman as a boy. I won the Area and County Sports Long Jump and worked my way up to opening both the batting and bowling in the school cricket team. I started in the football XI as a full-back, then went to centre-half and finally centre-forward. The highlight was scoring a first half hat-trick in a 6-0 victory in a ‘local derby’ against New Parks. A lad called Rob Pears also scored a hat-trick in the second half. I also seem to recall scoring with – not from – two direct corners in one game. There were goalposts and nets involved but I don’t think it was an actual school match. Then again, maybe I just dreamt that!

Football was king on the park and if there wasn’t a big game to be had we would just have a ‘kick-about’. Usually there would be four of us: the Smith brothers, myself and Geoff Huwlett, who was the star of the school team. He was a terrifically charismatic kid, full of wit and mischief, and a genuinely brilliant footballer who, but for his diminutive stature would surely have had a future in the professional game. Often, we would play on the path in front of ‘The Arbour’, a shelter half-way across the park. This structure (a popular trysting spot in the evenings), provided a goal from which the ball rebounded – thereby saving us the toil of having to forever retrieve the ball as was necessary on the grass. Geoff would not only run rings around the rest of us but would also keep up a running commentary in which Leicester City were forever locked in crucial combat with either Man.Utd. or Spurs.

Geoff could - and frequently did - play in any position, although he preferred wing or centre. He could keep the ball in the air longer than anyone I knew and, despite his lack of height, was also an exceptionally acrobatic and effective goalkeeper. To me, he seemed like a scaled-down compendium of Stanley Matthews, Jimmy Greaves and Gordon Banks. He came from a humble background on the Tudor Road and when we were at ‘Dicky Hallam’ Juniors, he was the toughest kid there. As hard as nails, Geoff was – just like the hob-nailed boots he had to wear back then with his short trousers (we all wore shorts until we went to Fosse). Like his crew-cut, the boots were meant to last and he made the most of them. When there was ice on the ground, he was the envy of us all at that junior school with its steep approach. He would slide down that hill as if he were on skis!

(Picture 8: The hill that still leads up to Alderman Richard Hallam Junior school from Anstey Lane. I did a few days supply teaching there a few years ago and was struck by how the configuration of the classrooms and playgrounds were uncannily and exactly the same as I remembered them fifty years on).

That famous winter of ’62 / ’63 turned Fosse Park into a white wonderland for months and the slope brought out all manner of sleds, most of them improvised. Just about the only paternal thing I can ever remember my unbeloved stepfather doing for me was to make me a sled. He was a blacksmith and a number of his wrought-iron front gates can still be seen along the Fosse Road. He was obviously better at gates than sleds because mine simply wouldn’t go and veered hopelessly to one side. I quickly reverted to a sheet of hardboard that fairly whizzed along. There was a bad accident that winter though, when a boy hurtled into one of the trees at the bottom of the hill and broke his neck. We were a little more circumspect following that. Eventually the ice on the slope wore away due the all the activity and not long after the spring finally arrived – ‘The Big Thaw’, I think it was dubbed at the time.

And there usually was snow in the Winter before Spring arrived with its crocuses and daffodils shooting up around the perimeter of the park. Then after the games of Summer and the lolling around on the grass listening to the pirate radio stations out of tiny portable radios, there came Autumn and  long avenues of leaves to kick through. Like all parks, Fosse was a slow-turning, kaleidoscopic little world and I was a boy for all its seasons.

(Picture 9: Fosse Park as it is now. Unlike most places, it has actually changed for the better and has more trees and a small all-weather pitch with proper five-a-side goalpost with nets which we would have loved back in the day. The shelter half-way across and the toilets at either end have gone along with the Keeper’s hut, but it is still a lovely space and brings back memories whenever I walk around it, as I still often do).

As well as the parks, there was, the aforementioned Rally. If you crossed the bridge over Fosse Road, you could follow the by then disused Great Cental Line train-tracks which stretched right up to the Glenfield tunnel. Geoff Huwlett, George and Chris ofSmith and I undertook several treks along that line during our boyhood. If you’ve ever seen the film of a Stephen King story called ‘Stand By Me’, you’ll have a sense of what those adventures were like, albeit on a smaller scale and without the dead body (although I’m sure we imagined many of our own). I still feel a chill when I think of that tunnel which, as far as I know, has never been stopped up. It was a genuinely eery place and we never ventured too far into it.

The River Soar and the canal, as I’ve said, were within easy reach and many a long ramble was to be had along the banks of both. The canal, which ran through the Woodgate and West End areas was still quite a busy hub of industry at the time. One our little gang’s first entrepreneurial efforts was to collect a sack of old clothes and present it to the sharp-intake-of-breath merchants at Piggott’s ScrapYard for what would invariably prove to be a disappointing pittance. During the long, frozen winter of ’62 / 63, I was often dispatched down to Russell’s foundry by the canal where my stepfather worked, to bring home coal and coke.

(Picture 10: The River Soar, looking down from the St. Margaret’s Way bridge towards Frog Island and the factories, mills and dyeworks around Woodgate. It is a picture of our industrial past as most of those buildings are now derelict or used for other purposes).

Eventually we had electric fires and then central heating with a proper bathroom, but before that it was an open fire and an outside toilet lit and warmed (if that’s the word) by a paraffin lamp. When she died in 1970, my Grandma’s council house on Hallam Crescent still only had a coal fire, an outside toilet and no hot running water (the bath had to be filled with buckets of water boiled in the kitchen copper and lugged sloshing up the stairs. She still had an old tin bath downstairs and preferred that as she became more infirm. That house though, with its quite large corner-front garden with the lilac tree and the triangular lawn at the back (both of which I loved playing in with my toy soldiers and cars) always remained a luxury to her compared to the grim slum where she’d previously lived in the town’s Wharf Street area before being relocated prior to the Second World War.
When bad weather precluded outdoor play,I would often amuse myself indoors with a couple of homemade games based on football and cricket.

By this time I’d pretty much outgrown the toy soldiers and cars and was obsessed with both sports. The football game was inspired by the then popular board-game ‘Wembley’ and involved leagues, cup games and internationals decided on the throw of dice. Goal-scorers were also found - this time by a pair of dice (ie. if you threw a total of seven, the right winger scored; nine and it was the centre-forward and so on). It was an enormous project, not least because I made up fictitious names for teams and players and wrote up all results and league-tables, not to mention selecting the international team! I must have spent a huge amount of time playing the game – especially when staying with my Grandma, due to not knowing any of the local Braunstone kids, none of whom seemed to live nearby anyway. I only ever played this game on my own – probably because it took so long, but my friends and I hardly ever played around each other’s houses. Come to think of it, the Smith brothers had both the football and cricket versions of ‘Subbuteo’ and the ‘Scalex-tric’ racing cars game, but I never warmed to any of those. 

I developed the cricket game in the playground at junior school with a friend called Martin Whale. This again involved dice: a sequence of six throws would constitute an over and runs would accumulate accordingly. The number 5 would occasion an appeal whereupon  the dice would be thrown again to determine the mode of dismissal (ie. 1 = bowled; 2 = caught; 3 = not out etc.). I developed a more sophisticated version of this along the lines of the dice-football game to play on my own. It followed the career of one particular player’s meteoric rise to international stardom and did, I must confess, feature a great deal of sleight of hand in order to maintain the desired arc of success. The player’s name - who was very much the Ian Botham of his time -  was ‘Ian Roberts’ coincidentally…Kids today, of course, can play virtual sports with their Wii gizmo’s and Playstations but I doubt if they are any more gripped and absorbed than I was back in those low-tech days.

Martin Whale and I drifted apart on reaching Fosse Secondary but I do remember him becoming almost cursedly unlucky. In order to study woodwork at Fosse, the students had to be marched in single file down to the workshop in the school’s annexe on Balfour Street about ten minute’s walk away. As we were queued up waiting to be let in, a pigeon shat copiously all over Martin’s head and shoulders (and Martin was a meticulously smart and well groomed boy). This, of course, created much side-splitting hilarity amongst the rest of us boys, but we were interested to learn from the  bald, bullet-headed and poker-faced Mr. Bright - rarely was a teacher more inappropriately named – that being selected for bird-bombing was actually a good omen and meant that Martin was in for some luck. He was – bad luck, because shortly afterwards he was accidentally smashed in the face with a bat during a game of actual cricket in the playground! Poor Martin – it made a hell of a mess of his mouth and teeth. I lost touch with him after school but I do hope he’s enjoyed better luck since.

(Picture 11: The boys’ playground at Fosse as it is today – just the same, in fact, as it was in the 1960s, minus the cars, of course. Note the sheltered area beyond the pillars and the white one-storey annex which was the Metalwork shop. A much coveted job just off  the playground at the bottom of the stairwells that emptied out at either end, was Crisps Monitor. The monitors were always changing on account of succumbing to the terrible temptation to fiddle the takings and/or give away packets to their mates. My favourite crisps were ‘Potato Puffs’, but they have disappeared long since, probably due to the political incorrectness of the name. Oh well.

This might be the place to reminisce about some of the poor souls who attempted to instil in me knowledge and good citizenship whilst I attended ‘Dicky ‘Allam’ Juniors and Fosse Sec. Mod (also known as ‘Mental Road’ by some of its inmates). The fact is that I remember very little of my compulsory education – although some of its outdated ‘3 R’s’ and no nonsense discipline must have sank in because I haven’t done too badly since. I was useless at Maths (bottom sets, I think) but I can still handle mental arithmetic and basic geography and history more efficiently than many younger folk.

My first crush may well have been the tall, blonde Miss Slingsby at Juniors (mind you, all teachers were tall then, and all female staff were titled ‘Miss’). I was avid to move on as quickly as possible to the next book in the ‘Wide Range’ reading programme so as to gain her praise and smiles. She it was who read to us all gathered round and sat cross-legged on the carpet. I recall Kipling’s ‘Just So’ stories and especially ‘Rikki Tikki Tavi’. She it was too, who had us all painted up as redskins with real feathers and cardboard tomahawks in a stage production for parents of Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’.

Dicky ‘Allam could, in those days, also boast the fearsome Miss Anstey (either Head or Deputy, I forget which). Very tall, straight-backed and darkly, smartly dressed with jet black hair and, I think, black horn-rims, she commanded a very tight assembly indeed. Such was her awesome and otherworldly air of command that I assumed Anstey Lane, the school address, was named after, and possibly belonged to her. I suspect that I might well find her damnably attractive if I saw her today in her early 1960’s pomp…

A Mr. Fieldhouse taught Arithmetic, Music and Handwriting. He was a greying, whiskery old cove in a suit, collar and tie, and highly polished, stout shoes. At the time, I estimated him to be well over a hundred years old but I suppose he may have actually been younger than I am now, as I write half a century later. I remember little or nothing of the maths and music but can still quite vividly see him chalking up immaculate lines of copperplate and italics for us to copy. I also seem to recall him once sitting down on his precious violin – much to his consternation and the general
merriment of the class.

Nowadays, I can appreciate Fosse Sec. Mod. as a handsome example of Victorian redbrick school architecture that rescued generations of working-class children from lives of ignorance but back then I think I saw it as a sort of Alcatraz surrounded by the bay of streets where I played. I wound up there – as opposed to the local ‘intermediate’/ technical or grammar schools – as a result of failing my ‘Eleven Plus’ exam. I can barely remember taking the test but I do recall a boy who passed turning up at the junior school on the day of the results on a brand new racing bike with a satchel full of sweets. Obviously educational success could pay off!

The Deputy Head at Fosse was the Mr. Coulsey mentioned above who had failed so ignominiously in his attempt to establish a rugby team. Rather similar in appearance to Mr. Fieldhouse back at the Juniors, but with immaculately plastered chestnut curls and ferociously clean-shaven cheeks which glistened as red as the well-scrubbed neck which seemed to chafe at his brilliantly starched white collar, he was popularly – or unpopularly - known as ‘Killer Coulsey’. His reputation had been earnt through years of relentless caning.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he was Caner-In-Chief and the thrashing area was the vestibule outside the Head’s office where a Punishment Book rested on an occasional table. I was sent there on more occasions than I care to remember. Most of the entries in this volume were concise and business-like – ie. date; names of caner and canee; canee’s class; nature of transgression and amount of thwacks (euphemistically, they were called ‘strokes’).    

The Killer’s entries though, would, at a glance, stand out not only due to their regularity but also their length and copperplate eloquence. Each beating was preceded by a lecture – dreaded by miscreants almost as much as the stick itself – which always ended with the somewhat unlikely avowal that this was going to hurt The Killer more than it would hurt you. The Killer taught Music but, believe me, that is where any similarity with Jerry Lee Lewis ended. I was in the early throes of a music mania that still to this day has me in its grip, but The Killer’s lessons were dry as dust. He would sit at the front at his baby-grand occasionally punctuating dreary discourses about the Great Composers with the odd few bars of actual music before lapsing into yet another yawn-inducing digression. For The Killer, good music had only been produced by people long dead. Consequently, his lessons were long and dead boring.

Mr. Bloxham, taught, if memory serves, Maths from some six and a half feet of height and approximately four feet of width. Atop this awesome, grey-suited bulk sat a grim, unsmiling visage from which would issue orders that had to be obeyed and threats that were always carried through in a broad Brummie accent. Woe betide anyone who snickered at that accent. Woe indeed - Mr. Bloxham’s reputation inspired even more terror than that of The Killer.

His specialty punishment was a procedure he called ‘The Treatment’. I can recall no other disciplinary sanction designed to inflict quite as much tension, pain and public humiliation. If you were unfortunate enough to be summoned to the front of Bloxham’s class after getting on his nerves when he was in one of his frequent black moods this is what would happen. First you would be positioned with your face up against the blackboard and made to stand on tiptoes. At this point, ‘Blocko’ would put a dot of chalk on the board level with your upturned nose. You were then ordered not to move a muscle whilst he turned back to resume teaching the class, having, in the meantime, picked up the board-ruler. The routine then was for the class to listen to the lesson whilst keeping eagle-eyes on the victim’s heels. When the heels eventually and inevitably sank down the class would gleefully alert Blocko. He would then turn and execute a sharp blow to hapless victim’s sorry arse –and make no mistake, this was no tap but a full-on whack. The class would roar with glee. The victims were frequently reduced to tears.

Incidentally, I have simulated ‘The Treatment’ many times during my teaching career and always to the enormous entertainment of various classes. However, although schoolchildren tend to be very gullible, I could usually tell that they thought I was making it all up - a case of fact being stranger than fiction.

One afternoon, during my last year at the school, my turn to be subjected to this torture came around. I don’t remember what terrible transgression I had committed to deserve it, but I do remember instinctively knowing that I would not stand for it – on tiptoes or otherwise – and I walked out of the classroom and the school building.

The following day, I was taken by Blocko to that vestibule by the Head’s office. Blocko was seething and I was amazed that he was only putting me down for two ‘strokes’. No doubt about it, I was scared. I hadn’t been caned by Blocko before but I somehow felt sure that he would not be a stroker. He was furious with me – so much so that after lining me up, palm outstretched under the naked light bulb, he threw back his cane-wielding arm with such force that he knocked one of the framed photographs of a football XI off the wall. It smashed on the floor and I then made the mistake of giggling nervously. Two ‘strokes’ rapidly turned into four and by the time he’d done I had blood blisters forming on both palms. The ‘Treatment’ might have been preferable after all…

Corporal punishment was on its way out even then and not many of the staff at Fosse would administer it personally – hence ‘Killer’ Coulsey’s’ role as Caner-In-Chief. Did it do us any harm? Probably not much. Was it an effective deterrent to bad behaviour? Well, not really, judging by the repetition of the same names recurring in that Punishment Book. It was more like a badge of honour for kids building up reputations as hard-nuts.

A degree of casual violence inflicted on kids by staff was fairly routine. You were frequently shoved about and clipped around the ear but didn’t dream of complaining to your parents because if you did, you would at best be told that you must have deserved it or, at worst, got more of the same from them. Looking back from these more ‘enlightened’ times, it was pretty unpleasant, but one has to say that the situation has gone too far in the opposite direction now when teachers are continually on eggshells, with even sarcasm – the last weapon in their armoury – being frowned upon by Ofsted, parents and other powers that be.

Miss Fry who taught French at Fosse was untroubled by such scruples. A formidably tall, large-bosomed lady with long dark hair and a ski-slope nose, she would dish out raps to the hands with a metal ruler or knuckle your skull as aids to concentration. About a dozen of us, however, had her to thank for supervising a memorable school trip to Paris, Brussels and the First World War battlefields and cemeteries.

The Head at Fosse then was a Mr. Chaplin, a low-profile character who apart from sermonizing monotonously at assemblies, seemed to keep to the background. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade me to stay on and take O’ Levels. Along with some of he other staff, he quickly became a bit of a blur when I did leave to take up an engineering apprenticeship (which I stuck at for all of three months or so). I was the youngest in my year and actually started work a few weeks before my fifteenth birthday.

I do remember the squat, ginger Welshman, Mr. Evans (‘Taffy to us, of course) who taught Science and ran a very tight lab. He delighted in showing us the bit of cartilage he’d had removed from his knee. It floated queasily in formaldehyde in a transparent plastic tube. That though, was nothing compared to the day when I almost sliced the top off my finger with a scalpel during a lesson of dissection. Girls squealed in horror at the blood and one even fainted which was all very satisfying. Strangely, the same girls had coped remarkably well with chopping up the sheep’s head on which we were working…

Mr. Warner was Head of P.E. and ran the practise-sessions for the Leicester Boys football team. Those of us in the school team would sometime provide opposition for the young stars and I remember that Peter Shilton, who later went on to become England’s most capped international, never wanted to play in goal, preferring instead to race around yawping orders at everyone else. For a while, Bob Rowell, an England rugger international taught at Fosse, but the P.E. teacher I remember least fondly was a bronzed Adonis called Mr. Lunn who drove a sports car and had girls swooning over him. He was a nasty little bully who once beat up my best friend Geoff Hulett, who was half his size, under the pretext of a boxing lesson.

Ironically – given that I became a teacher of English - I can remember very little of my English lessons with Mr. Wallace who, by the standards of the day, was quite a liberal in his methods. I can recall reading a sub-‘Treasure Island’ yarn called ‘Moonfleet’ but the only other book that stands out was the fabulous ’play for voices’ by Dylan Thomas, ‘Under Milk Wood’. In retrospect, I think that must have been a courageous choice by Mr. Wallace, considering what a bunch of oiks we were. He also organized a school magazine which I co-edited with another boy. This boy somehow managed to pass off a story about a spider as his own (perhaps Mr. Wallace wasn’t familiar with Kafka…). He was found out eventually and skulked around in shame for a while. Anyway, that magazine was my publishing debut but  another irony was that Mr. Lunn - who didn’t strike me as much of a reader – virtually accused me of plagiarising my poem about a dying soldier on the grounds that I couldn’t possibly have come up with the word ‘mediocrity’ myself. I told him I’d learnt the word from the Simon & Garfunkel song, ‘Homeward Bound’, but he remained sneeringly unconvinced.  

Fosse was a ‘co-educational’ school with mixed classes, but despite the proximity of the fairer sex, we boys, in truth were more focused on mischief and sports than finding a girlfriend. We may have been growing out of re-enacting the Wild West and the World Wars, but only to grow into mimicry of our favourite TV comedy shows. Everybody could do Harry H. Corbett and Wilfred Brambell from ‘Steptoe & Son’ and the immortal Pete ‘N’ Dud from ‘Not Only But Also’ (what a pity that the BBC in their infinite myopia wiped most of those Cook & Moore shows in order to save videotape!). Everybody watched ‘Coronation Street’ or ‘Corro’ as it was generally known (no-one called it ‘Corrie’ back then). Two other key shows, were obviously ‘Top Of The Pops’ and the even more exciting ‘Ready Steady Go’.

As a boy, I had only been vaguely aware of pop music – until 1963, that is. Before that, I’d been too young for Rock & Roll which had, along with Elvis Presley, passed me by (even as a kid, I can remember thinking that conveyor belt of Elvis and Cliff films to be useless.) My Mum had some old 78s – I can remember her playing Johnny Ray’s version of ‘Walkin’ In The Rain’ and ‘Diana’ by Paul Anka in particular. If you’d asked me at the time what my favourite record was, I would probably have said ‘Apache’ by The Shadows which chimed in nicely with my Cowboys & Indians obsession. I can also recall a bunch of us kids having the odd sing-song in the street – I can’t really bring the repertoire to mind but I’m pretty sure The Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’ and Cliff Richard’s ‘Bachelor Boy’ were in there somewhere. My memory plays me false with Cliff’s ‘Summer Holiday’ though because I thought it predated The World Changing Forever by at least a year but, according to the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles it was out at the same time as…

‘Please Please Me’ by The Beatles. I had missed their first, ‘Love Me Do’ – probably because it didn’t reach the Top Ten, but the very first time I heard ‘Please Please Me’, it was like a firework display going off in my mind. The world tilted for me and  millions of others as Beatle Mania exploded all over Britain and, within a year all over the world. I think the first record I ever saved up to buy was the ‘Twist & Shout’ EP that summer from a little electrical shop in Woodgate. Then there was ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – a thousand times better a film than all that Cliff and Elvis mush!

In the heady grip of the mania, I set about making replica guitars out of cardboard for me and the Smith brothers. The Hoffner bass was for Chris (who was Paul McCartney), the Rickenbacker for me (John Lennon) and the Gretsch for George (George Harrison, naturally).Oddly, we didn't recruit a Ringo, I don't recall why not.We’d play the records – they had the early singles – at top volume on their big sister’s Dansette and bop around with the ‘guitars’, caterwauling away with the songs and shaking our fringes like mad (oh yes, we were all absolutely willing our hair to grow longer by then). We’d drive Mrs. Smith mad and she’d forever be screaming at us to ‘Shut the bleddy ‘ell up and go outside to play!’

(Picture 11: That’s me c. 1966 on one of our rare family holidays - Chapel St. Leonards, I think. Behind those shades, I would have been avidly concentrating on growing my hair!).

The Beatles would develop into one of the great cultural stories of the twentieth century and the body of work they created is now seen as the unsurpassable zenith of popular music. Way back then though, my boyhood was coming to an end and when I left Fosse Secondary Modern in that psychedelic, ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Summer of Love, I went straight into the world of work. Despite 1967 being the first year that Fosse had offered some of its students the option of doing O’Levels, I decided I’d had enough of school and wanted to earn more than fourteen shillings per week.

Thus it was that I embarked on that engineering apprenticeship before drifting through various unskilled, dead-end jobs working in factories, shops, warehouses and building sites, starting on just £4 per week and never earning more than £25 per week up to the point in 1976 when I enrolled at Scraptoft College to train as a teacher.

I’d gone back to school at nights, you see, to acquire the qualifications I’d turned my back on at Fosse Secondary Modern. Yes, I went back to school, but, obviously, I never could get back to my childhood. My home-life during the ten years or so that I lived on Fosse Road North was not the happiest, but out in the streets and on the parks with those friends, many of whom I lost touch with almost immediately after leaving school, was a wonderful time and place to grow up. I hope I manage to convey something of what it was like in this piece of writing.

IGR 2013