It’s a late afternoon on a winter Saturday of my childhood. And that means the big Ferguson radio – the one that had the exotic place names on the dial – Hilversum, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Limoges, Toulouse – is warmed up.

The fire is lit, the coal scuttle is full and the kettle is on.  And my father – who was not really any kind of sports fan or gambler – is waiting for the classified football results to check his pools coupon. Perhaps this week will be the big win. 

It’s five o’clock. Time for Sports Report. Nothing unique to my home. Just play this to any Brit of a certain vintage and they too will likely conjure up a similar scene.

That jaunty tune – Out of the Blue – written by film composer Hubert Bath – was the intro to BBC Radio’s Sports Report. It brings back the time when football games began at 3pm on Saturdays, when the results were read at 5.30 and millions checked their pools coupon. Would this be the week for the big win? 

That tune and the program it introduced has the capacity to transport millions back to long gone Saturday teatimes. It launched, and dashed, the dream of winning the pools.

And Perhaps Kippers for Tea

It was a vegetarian household with exceptions for the occasional piece of fish or tin of sardines, sock-eye salmon or pilchards. Bacon for breakfast when my aunt Olive came to stay. Fish and chips if we ever had to eat out – which was almost never except perhaps once on the annual July seaside holiday. And Spam, Fray Bentos corned beef or luncheon meat (disgusting) if there were guests. 

So kippers were a rare Saturday treat – rich and salty and delicious with brown bread and butter. But what really mattered were those game scores. In those days Eamonn Andrews was the presenter and John Webster read the classified results. 

The Saturday Ritual

And that reading – a litany of the faraway places and teams with magical names. It was an incantation, a ritual. The voice indicating a win, a loss or a draw by the rise and fall and intonation.

And the names! 

Tranmere Rovers, Accrington Stanley, Crewe Alexandria, Queens Park Rangers, Crystal Palace, Leyton Orient, Sheffield Wednesday, Plymouth Argyle, Tottenham Hotspur, Preston North End and all the rest. 

Scunthorpe and Lindsey. Bournemouth and Boscombe, Brighton and Hove.

Albion, Athletic, City, County, Town, Rangers, Rovers, and Wanderers, United.

To a child’s ear it was a transport to a magical world of faraway places.

But there was more to come. After the English and Welsh results came the Scottish leagues. Don’t get me started on the tongue twisting romance magic of Hamilton Academicals. And then Queen of the South, Partick Thistle, Raith Rovers.

Such places, such team names!

What or where was the Heart of Midlothian? Why Third Lanark?  (What had happened to the first and second?)  Cowdenbeath! Stenhousemuir. Alloa Athletic, Brechin City. Dunfermline – where that king had sat drinking his bluid red wine and seeking a sailor for his ship – Athletic two. Said on a high note and then with a drop of the voice, so you know they had lost, – Airdrieonians-  nil. (What on earth was an Airdrieonian?)

Verbal music. Pure poetry that blend in with the other rhymes, rhythms and jingles of the time. 

Television and Tyranny of Neighbors

We didn’t have a television until much later but the neighbors at the corner – the slightly sinister and definitely shady Wall family – did. And they played it loud and had family rows at top volume to boot.  On summer nights, when the windows were open, it was enough to keep me restlessly awake worrying about getting enough sleep to keep up at school. I had the catch phrases of the commercials swimming in my brain. 

Murray Mints, the too-good-to-hurry mints.
Don’t forget the Fruitgums, mum. (Later mum changed to chum to avoid being accused of putting shopping pressure on mothers.)
Coates comes up from Somerset, where the cider apples grow. (Zummerzet  zider -ooh! aarh!)
Oh the Esso sign means happy motoring, The Esso sign means happy motoring, The Esso sign means happy motoring, Call at the Esso sign, For Esso Extra! Extra! (Sometimes in a Welsh accent.)
Fry’s Turkish Delight. Full of eastern promise. (Hmm!)
Gives a meal man appeal. (Got to keep men happy. A simple Oxo bouillon cube was all you needed.)
Looks good. Tastes good. And by golly it does you good. (This for Mackeson beer – a  milk stout with a claim to be nutritious and once recommended for nursing mothers.)

I don’t actually remember any specific washing powder ads but I know they were on constantly – Omo, Daz, Surf, Persil – drifting up with the night scented stock, always whiter than white.(How was that even possible?)

The Playground

Children – being natural subversives – took these jingles and invented playground versions to go with the skipping songs and jokes drawn from popular culture and folklore. 

You’ll wonder where your back teeth went if you brush your teeth with Pepsodent. 

Green Gravel is a traditional folk song with a long documented history. By the 1950’s it was a playground skipping song with a scurrilous edge:

Green gravel, green gravel
Your age is sixteen
Your boyfriend sent a letter
Complaining the weather
Turn your back
You saucy cat  
How many kisses did you give him? 
One, two, three…

My job was usually on one end of the rope and at this point the speed was turned up until the skipper was counted out and the next one jumped in and it all began again.

All in together, girls.
How do you like the weather, girls?
Jan-u-ary, Feb-ru ary, March, A-pril ….

And then there was

Bluebells, cockle shells,
Eevie, ivy, over

And a game that had to do with holding hands in a line and making an arch:

In classic children’s form it was a gleeful account of sinking ships and death by drowning.  

Say what you will
School dinners make you ill
Davy Crocket died of shepherd’s pie.
All school din dins
Come from pig bins
Out of town.

(Sung to the tune of the Max Bygraves hit.)

This was all on the Clarence Street School girls playground –  place of fierce competition and brutal morality.

There was a steep asphalt slope at the bottom of which were the outdoor toilets. A fearful place of strange disinfectant smells and spiders where you could get jumped at or pushed for no reason, Just because some girls were important and you were an outsider.

It was good to have sweets.  Rowntrees Fruit Gums or Pastilles, or a tube of Rolos could help you survive morning playtime. They were a good stand by and when I had money I could buy them from the Polish deli when I got off the blue and cream corporation double decker bus. It was across the alley from the abandoned Empire theater and across Groundwell Road from the Roman Catholic Holy Rood School.

Playground life could be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and playtime long. It was useful to be able to buy a way in. We all need to belong. A twist of aniseed balls, sherbet lemons or pear drops – for bribes – was very helpful in negotiating safety. But if you had too many – that could be a problem too. It was all a great worry.

Clarence Street School, on the corner of Clarence and Euclid Streets, was built at a cost of £12,091 to accommodate 840 girls and boys and 320 infants. It’s now a grade II listed building – part of ye olde English heritage.  

It was built with the civic pride of a growing railway town – red brick with stone dressings. Apparently it’s Dutch Renaissance style with elaborate Dutch gables, a molded terracotta panel with an inscribed frieze with the date 1895 and a carved head medallion below. To me it felt like a prison. 

In 1952 Swindon was designated a London spillover town and growth was rapid. After 1953 the number of children attending Swindon schools increased from just over 10,000 at the rate of 1,000 a year. 

We moved to the new Walcott council estate in 1955 and, until the new schools were built, Walcott and Park children attended Clarence Street. By 1958 the school was bursting at the seams and had over a 1000 children enrolled. There were forty eight in my class.

The Spots of Time

In his poetic biography William Wordsworth wrote of the “spots of time”  to which we can return in order to renovate, refresh, and restore our health  and wellbeing.in times of stress and depression.

These spots, he wrote, are a kind of deep knowledge on which we can draw to invisibly repair our mental health. Such moments, he says, are scattered everywhere and take their date from childhood. 

I don’t think the memories in this post count as the kinds of epiphanies that Wordsworth meant but they have started me thinking about what might be such spots of time. 

He had a deep storehouse of childhood experiences on which he drew throughout his life. Times of intense emotion that he would then recall in later tranquillity. The Prelude is full of them – moments of discovery and strong feeling – a childhood to which he returned for emotional self renewal, restoration and rejuvenation.  

He remembers these spots of time as kinds of epiphanies that were an enduring influence throughout his life – key moments in the history of his imagination. 

 … Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood

I think they are worth looking for. 

Meanwhile – toodling around the intertubes – I found this novelty (looks like 1950s) alarm clock showing a couple checking the pools. There’s a lucky black cat in the armchair and the alarm is set for 5.30 which is when the classified football results were read on Sports Report. Testimony to the pools as a pervasive cultural habit of the time.

While we are looking for those spots of time it might be wise to be wary of descending into lost golden age nostalgia. Recent politics have shown us just how dangerous and destructive that can be.