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| Moor Nook and River Ribble |
Favourite places have to evoke strong images, friendships and the continuity of life's journey. My second choice after Langdale is Moor Nook, the large housing estate where I lived from the age of 4 to 18. It was built in the optimism of 1950s Britain, when things happened at a pace, and despite the old class system still hanging on, there were stirrings of an egalitarian revolution. Attlee's post-war government initiatives had been continued by Churchill's late-life apathy as PM. Thereafter, they continued more positively during Harold Macmillan's pragmatic tenure as prime minister at a time of increasing affluence for many families. His soubriquet of 'Supermac' certainly curried favour in Preston, which was festooned with new council estates, new schools, and the UK's first motorway, the Preston bypass, later to become the M6. Preston even elected two Tory MPs in 1959.
The essential ingredients of Moor Nook were well-constructed council houses planned in an attractive semi-circle of crescents, an award-winning new primary school, and a regular municipal bus service that ran like clockwork at seven and a half minute interludes to the town centre. Moor Nook housed a double dose of baby boomers. There was an average of three children per house in my crescent, 57 of us in the first twenty houses.
Dennis, who lived across the road, was my best friend. We made every day an adventure and persuaded others to join in. Less than a hundred yards away was a mixed woodland, Brockholes Wood, that covered the scarp slope down to the River Ribble. It provided a huge adventure playground for the children, featuring a natural sand pit, vibrant birdlife and enough climbable trees to result in a steady stream of broken legs and arms to the local hospital. We were feral, spending almost every hour outside and cycling to distant villages and exploring the countryside way beyond the boundaries permitted by parental instructions.
We had an equilateral triangle of grass just around the corner, which provided for regular impromptu football games for about ten to fifteen of us. Kicking downhill towards the woodland to the base of the triangle allowed lots of wide-wing play, whilst uphill to the apex of the triangle required a diamond formation. Even as eight- and nine-year-old mini Guardiolas, we understood the different formations to play in. Cricket was played in the street with lampposts as wickets; it required leg spin from the gutter to left-handed batters like Dennis. There were few cars, and they were mainly three-wheeler Bond Minis, made in Preston, but generally found standing on bricks in gardens as the front wheels had a tendency to collapse. This meant that it was possible to extend a rope across the road and play tennis in summer, and make the rare cars, ice cream and grocery vans wait until points were finished before the rope was dropped. Although not designated as a play area, children ruled the street.
Girls were not involved in these games, although they joined the boys for chasing games on roller skates and shorter bike sorties. They mostly stuck to skipping games and pushing doll prams. In 1960, Dennis and I organised a week of athletics during the Rome Olympic Games and attracted quite a few girls amongst the thirty or so participants. I recall that Janice Sutton, Eileen Sutcliffe and Bernadette, my neighbour's cousin, who came every day from her home over a mile away, were more than a match for most of the boys.
A row of shops was built about two years after we moved in, and they created a hub of activity. The cigarette machines took two shilling pieces and gave back 10 Players. Capstan or Senior Service and a halfpenny sellotaped on the packet, or you could get 3 Woodbines for 6d. This was a ready-made attraction for young smokers, almost as effective a recruitment for a lifetime of tobacco addiction as the armed forces had been for our parents. Dennis smoked all three of our first packet of Woodbine we bought. This was after I started coughing and gave up after a couple of drags on my one and only cigarette. Dennis soon became a regular teenage smoker before he joined the Navy to get his daily ration of cigarettes.
Best of all was Brockholes Wood, where we could make dens, erect rope swings from the trees, play chasing games, observe the abundant birdlife, and watch older boys shoot air rifles and flee if they started firing at us. Films and TV cowboy series had a lot to answer for; they were the influencers for the baby boomers. It was only a ten-minute walk down to the River Ribble. We could fish for roach, chub, and the occasional trout, paddle and swim in the summer and walk upstream to Ribchester during the winters when it froze over - the big freeze-up lasted 9 weeks in 1962.
The wood was breached in 1958 to construct Britain's first stretch of Motorway, the Preston bypass, which eventually became the M6. Huge earthmoving machinery created a more sedate gradient up the original scarp slope. After the first layer of tarmac was laid in the summer of 1958, and when the men knocked off in the evening, we would race our bikes down the incline of the two-lane motorway, reaching speeds in the high thirties according to the speedometer on my friend Nick's bike. My class from the nearby primary school were frog marched to the opening by Harold Macmillan in December 1959.
Life in the primary school was good; 550 children were crammed into a school designed for 400. There were 150 pupils in my year, split into 4 streamed classes. It was a happy atmosphere. In P5, my class had 23 girls and 13 boys, although by talking too much in class and not responding to being slippered by Mr Partington's size 8 Dunlop Tennis shoe, he banished me to the girls' side of the class, and as a further punishment, I had to line up with the girls. On some days, I was invited to join them in their fast skipping games. I was impressed by the dexterity and the energy involved; it was a break from playing football or chasing games in the large playground. I asked Mr Partington if I could enter the skipping race on school sports day. When I won the girls' skipping race and the boys' running race, the girls were not happy and complained. Mr Partington relented and allowed me to return to the boys' side of the class. Despite these travails, it did not affect my enjoyment of school or support from the teachers. In the final year, I was made head boy and football captain, and managed to remain friendly with most of the girls.
The final year was made special by a teacher, Mr Duerden, who would troop us out on nature walks on sunny days and take us out to the playground to play cricket if we got restless. We learnt a lot about things that were not on the eleven-plus syllabus, and that had a downside. Only two boys and six girls passed the eleven-plus. A mere 5.3% of the roll for the year, whereas the average for the Education Authority was 13%. It also meant that I would have to go to the Grammar School, which was seen as a place for posh kids by my classmates who would be going to the local secondary modern school.
At the Grammar School, the first year was a challenge. I had always been friendly with everyone at the primary school, but I knew no one at the grammar school. There were cliques of boys who came from the more affluent suburbs and hung about together. Many of the boys had racing bikes - Dawes, Claud Butlers, Carltons, Holdsworth or Mercian with 5 Campagnolo gears and Mavic or Weinmann brakes. My old BSA bike was too small; an embarrassment in the bike shed. I spent many an hour drooling over what bike I would buy and what components it would have. At school, the boys from Fulwood and Broughton had cricket whites, bats, boxes and Dunlop sports shoes, whereas I just had a pair of Woolworth's plimsolls and a better bowling action.
Dennis had been my best friend for the past six years. He was a year and a half older than me; a charismatic character, who at the age of thirteen became a teddy boy with a leather jacket, James Dean quiff and a cigarette addiction. Although we still played football and hung about together, we were drifting apart. We were in his house on a wet February half-term holiday; his mother, Alice, had got a job, so there was no adult to moderate behaviour. We were playing Risk, a Waddingtons game. His sister, Hazel, who was my age, wanted to play, but Dennis wouldn't let her; she was a girl. I took her side as it would be a better game with four of us; her younger brother was also playing. It erupted into a slanging match between Dennis and Hazel, and she sobbed her way to her room. I went up to calm her down and refused to play unless she was playing. I was accused of fancying her. She was a quiet, reserved girl who had never participated in street games or gone on our adventures in the woods or to the river. I hardly knew her, but my allegiance switched that day.
A couple of weeks later, Dennis and I were in the woods enjoying the danger of a new swing that arced out 30 feet above the sloping ground. Dennis fell and broke his arm. He returned from the hospital with his arm in plaster for 7 weeks. He was angry because he would lose his paper round, which financed his smoking and visits to the cinema. Hazel suggested to him that I could take his round for a while until he could ride his bike again. The paper round required a three-mile round trip to collect the newspapers. I was too young at 12 to get a paper round, but the newsagent was happy for me to cover for Dennis for a couple of months. I was keen to make a positive impression, and I got through the round quicker than Dennis; this was welcomed by the customers, who responded by giving me sizeable tips when I collected their money on Friday evenings.
Social problems were becoming apparent as I discovered on my paper round one evening, I happened upon a mixed-race girl who was a couple of years older than me. She was crying in the outhouse, waiting for her mother to return from work. She told me that her mother would not let her have a key, so she had to wait in the outhouse after school every afternoon until her mother returned from work. She had never met her Nigerian father; he was a sailor, and she found it difficult to make friends at school. We talked for a long time, and I tried to reassure her that she would find things easier and be successful when she started work. A year later, she had left school, got a job and looked like a happy and attractive young woman. She would always wave as we went about our lives. It made me think about the unfair way people are excluded and made to feel unwanted because of their background.
Things had improved by the second and third year at the grammar school; my days spent outside playing games, cycling and chasing games meant I was good at most sports, and I had been selected for the under-16 cross country team as a 13-year-old. This gave me immunity from the stigma of living on Moor Nook. Although I kept up friendships with my former primary school friends, I became more interested in the girls attending the 3 girl's grammar schools who caught the bus in the morning. One of them lived around the corner and came out to watch a dozen or so of us play football on the triangle of grass in the evenings. We all played to attract her attention as if she were a football scout. At the end of the game, we would gather around and discuss the game, music and politics with her; it was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. She selected me instead of Dennis to team up with and gifted me my first record, 'He's a Rebel' by the Crystals. I was chuffed, and Dennis was miffed. Teenage days had arrived.
It also became apparent that the estate was changing; the pride of living in a new house had worn off, better-off tenants were moving to new private housing developments, and new tenants were arriving, including households evicted from other schemes or from older terraced houses being demolished because they were below the tolerable standards. The estate was acquiring a reputation as the roughest estate in the town. Teenage gangs were congregating, marriages were breaking up, immigrants were allocated houses, cars were becoming more common as Bond Minis were cleared from front gardens and dispatched to the scrap yards.
A family from Ghana had been allocated a house along the road from us. The man was a graduate engineer and worked at English Electric, later to become British Aerospace; his wife looked after their young child. She was tall and graceful, but there seemed to be a silent hostility to her from the neighbours. If we were playing football in the street, I would stop the game to let her pass with her baby in a pram. She thanked me, and I asked her where she came from. I was studying Africa at school, and I asked her which part of Ghana, and it opened up a conversation that led to a friendship. I would often leave the football game to chat with her. She was well educated and told me that I was the only person on the estate who spoke to her. She invited me to the house to meet her husband, and I would occasionally babysit for them if they had to go out. This raised questions from some of the neighbours, who asked my mother why I was always chatting to the black woman.
By the time I was 16, I had entered the sixth form, something I had not even contemplated a couple of years earlier. In Moor Nook, many of my former primary school classmates had left school at 15, and Dennis was sailing around the world with the Navy. Hazel had blossomed and become a hairdresser and was dating professional footballers who called to collect her in their Lotus Cortinas. We were given more freedom at school, and the teachers were more personal. They encouraged me to apply for university, something that had never crossed my mind. I had started going to the pub on Friday evenings with my classmates from the Grammar School and friends from Moor Nook; it was a rite of passage. We began to appreciate the huge variety of local beers available at the local pubs; in summer, we would do a pub crawl of the nearby country pubs on our bikes.
We arranged a twelve-day hill walking holiday in the Lake District during the summer holidays. Four of us from Moor Nook, plus two other friends, gathered at my house to plan the route; my mother was always pleased to have friends coming round. We booked the Youth Hostels to reach the main fells - Scafell Pike, Helvellyn, the Langdale Pikes and Skiddaw. We traversed the fells, visited pubs and attempted to make friends with groups of girls. I changed our itinerary after I fell for a girl from Leeds and was determined to be at the same hostels on subsequent nights. We became pen friends for the next year or so.
An older friend had bought an Austin Cambridge, and we would spend weekends and holidays at a rented barn on Lake Windermere that his father and several neighbours shared. They had a sailing dinghy that provided us with the opportunity to take risks in quirky winds and usually managed to capsize. On other days, we would walk the high fells on the better days and visit the Lakeland pubs in the evening. I wanted to take up rock climbing, but there were no takers while we were still at school.
My final year at school and living in Moor Nook was like my final year at primary school. I had progressed every year, made lots of friends, my grades were good, and I liked the teachers. Things had worked out, although the loss of my grandma on the day before my Maths A-level exam really fazed me. The head teacher encouraged me to apply for an Oxford scholarship and offered me the chance to be House Captain and Deputy Head Boy. It would mean not leaving school until 19. Moor Nook boys liked to move on, so I accepted one of my university offers from Sheffield University to read Geography.
I had worked during the summer before leaving for Sheffield, and it felt like one of those tipping points in life as I prepared to leave home and say farewell to friends and neighbours. My father hired a car on a Friday, and together with my grandad, we drove through Manchester and across the Snake Pass to Sheffield. I had a single old suitcase with 5 shirts, a pair of Levis, a navy blue crew neck jumper, a pair of shoes and a pair of Adidas trainers. My father had also bought me a car radio that he had converted to be used as a battery radio. My digs were in an old Edwardian semi occupied by two elderly spinsters; the digs had no redeeming features, but there was a shortage of Halls of Residence and being at the end of the alphabet never helped. And that was it.
My grandad was in tears; we had always been close, and my grandma had died just 3 months earlier. He would be alone. My sister and brother would have their own bedrooms, and the family acquired a dog in my place. Moor Nook was just a place I visited for part of the holidays and on the occasional weekend when friends scattered to Manchester, Leeds, London, Glasgow, and Oxford would return to Preston to meet up. It had been a great place to grow up, a couple of inspiring teachers, lots of friends, the freedom to roam and to acquire values that would last a lifetime.
