Teenage Years

As I entered my teens we were living in the village of Milnrow, outside of Rochdale and on the edge of the Pennines.

School was Heywood Grammar School which we reached by courtesy of Yelloway Coaches and my own transport was this 3-geared racing bike. Frank had a slightly more modest bike - a concession that I had to wait a year longer to get mine! We would ride all over the place on them but the usual outings would be to Hollingworth Lake, over to Rochdale via Stanney Brook park or occasionally up onto the moors at Owd Betts. This was a very hard slog uphill but a wild brake-defying zoom back down again!

We also found a block of wooden garages off a road in the next village of Newhey, where the ground was covered in cinders which made a great skid patch for riding at speed and putting the back brake on to skid round a full semi-circle.

We did all the usual teenage things - toys became more technical. We made hundreds of Airfix kits of fighter planes. Then we would tie them with cotton to the clothes line and shoot them down from the bedroom window with an air rifle... There were open fields at the back of us so it was safe to play with the airgun.

We also followed Dad's hobby of making larger model aircraft capable of flying. This is in the field at the back of the house and I'm holding a model aeroplane powered by a rubber band. Instead of a full propeller it had a half one that was hinged on a piece of wire. This was attached to a rubber band that was fixed inside the fuselage. You wound the rubber band up by hand and it had enough power to take the model up 50 feet or so. Wind pressure then closed the propeller back against the body and it glided back down for a minute or two.

The body and wings were made of a framework of balsa wood covered in tissue paper which was then painted with dope - no, not drugs - a lacquer that strengthened the tissue and stretched it tight over the balsa wood skeleton. Every now and then we would fly the powered control liners (see 1950s Childhood entry). My mate Sid was an enthusiast for those, though his "flying wing" had a sticky elevator and flying it was a nightmare of jerky movements almost always ending in a crash landing before you even completed one circle!

November always saw us gathering wood for a huge bonfire on the spare land at the other side of the field behind our house. People used to fly tip there and we would gather all the wood and any other combustible items and build a huge bonfire that when lit could be seen from several miles away. Loads of people would come from all over the place and share food, parkin cake and treacle toffee, baked potatoes and black peas (which I used to hate).

Fireworks were less noisy then. Air bombs were only just coming out at the end of the 1960s and normally only had one bang in them. Most fireworks were designed to look good rather than make a noise. There were helicopters for 6d which looked like a normal firework but had cardboard wings. You placed them on their side and when they went off they spun horizontally and lifted off into the air.

There were bangers of course, and also Jumping Jacks - a zig-zagged package tied together with string that banged, jumped and banged again. The typical firework you see in Westerns when the Mexicans are having a fiesta. Catherine wheels, rockets, golden fountains and Roman Candles were the staple of a a good bonfire night. Oh, and some sparklers to hold! There were some other larger fireworks designed for holding too - Spitfire was one.

Mum didn't like fireworks though because when we were living at Royton around 1960 one - a Screecher - had gone wrong and instead of shooting up, it burst through the side of the firework and hit her in the throat. It wasn't a bad burn (though obviously not a "good" one either) but the sights she saw in the hospital, waiting to be seen, put her off fireworks for life.

I got very interested in photography and had a mate called Arnold Soloman who was also very keen. We spent hours blacking out bathrooms by pinning blankets over the window, to develop black and white films and photographs. The enlarger and dishes of chemicals would stand on a board placed over the bath.

I decided the instamatic just wasn't delivering good enough quality for subjects like stock car racing! We used to go to the stockcars regularly at Rochdale Hornets rugby ground on Kingsway. It's now a superstore - not even a comparison for the excitement the racing used to generate! We also used to go to Belle Vue sometimes to watch both stock cars and Speedway racing.

I bought a Prinzflex 500 camera - it was a Russian Zenit B with no light meter, but with a decent lens. I had bought it from Dixons and they had an agreement with their suppliers that they could badge the Zenit cameras with their own Prinzflex brand. Now in order to make best use of the camera, I needed one other optical piece of equipment...

I'd known for quite a while that I really needed glasses. I'd gone from sitting at the back of classes to the middle and then to the front row but it had now got to the stage where I couldn't read what was on the blackboard anyway.

I was 14, almost 15 - a horrible age for feeling shy and insecure. No one that knows me would ever believe I could be shy but I totally was at that time. And I had teenage acne that used to drive me mad. If ever there was a time to dread having to wear specs it was then. But I had no choice. I went to an opticians and he must have been surprised that I wasn't already wearing them because he took me outside the shop with the huge test rig on and said "That's what things will look like when you get your glasses!"

I was amazed! I hadn't realised how bad things actually were. Anyway, my worst fears came to nought and totally turned on their head when I first wore them to school and the girl I secretly fancied said "I think they make you look really good!" Ooh! Ah! Jelly legs! But I was still too shy to follow up, even later when she made it plain she fancied me... What a steaming pillock I was...

I've said elsewhere that Dad was a Main Collector for both Vernons and Littlewoods football pools. That means he collected coupons and money from all the normal Pools Collectors. When I was 15 he gave me a round on our local estate. By the time I was 17 I was out 2 nights a week and covered rounds all over Oldham. It's easy to forget how huge football coupons were before the National Lottery came in. Thousands of Collectors were out on Thursday and Friday nights, picking up coupons for the weekend's matches and giving a blank coupon for the following week.

I had rounds in some rough places... Walking round every Friday night at the same time when everyone knows you have a bag of money around your shoulders is not for the faint hearted! There were times when I would turn round and confront a group of lads who were following me making increasingly threatening comments. Luckily they always assumed that since I was willing to turn and face them that I must be sure of handling myself!

There was one estate in Rochdale where on one particular street, the Black Peas salesman, the Man from the Pru and I used to meet up to cover each other's backs... "See you next week, lads!" we'd say with relief as we reached the end of the street! During two years of collecting on that estate they convicted 4 murderers from it, including one guy who'd walked in a pub with a shotgun and used it on the landlord behind the bar. No I didn't collect his coupon. But I did collect from next door and used to sneak through his garden as a shortcut to next door but one!

A few other memories of collecting coupons... There were lots of pretty girls, some of whom used to shout "I'll go Dad!" and I'd stop for a snog for five minutes! There were some terrible, filthy houses which really smelt awful, but with salt-of-the-earth people who always asked you in out of the cold...

There were people who would have a cup of tea waiting and people who tried to press sherry on me every week. There was my future wife, sometimes as a visitor, totally bloody ignoring me as I collected coupons from her auntie... and finally there was one incident as I tried to light a cigarette in the parked car. I couldn't hear the hiss of gas from the lighter and held it to my ear to hear better - totally ignoring the fact that the flame plainly indicated there was gas in the bloody thing. So I set fire to my hair which was shoulder length in those days. If anyone remembers seeing a 17 year old lad batting with his hand at the side of his head which was on fire, in an old Hillman Minx one night then that would be me...

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