Quill Street

A look back at happy times spent with my grandfather. 1970s Northern England .

My maternal grandfather, Fred Richard Taylor, was born in Bradford, England, on the 26th day of November, 1912. We shared the same birthday.

It took a good few years for me to realise his name was actually Fred because everyone called him Dick - a short form of his middle name with the first letter swapped for a D. I don't understand the reasoning, but in England, apparently, this type of name shortening and first-letter swapping has been practiced for hundreds of years. In the early part of the 1900s a person named Robert would be known as Bob, and someone given the name Richard would almost certainly be called Dick. Whether Fred became known as Dick at birth or at school or later in life I'm not sure. And whether he liked it or not, as with so many other things that now seem important, I never asked him.

I do know that his wife - my grandma - never called him Fred and never Richard, only Dick.

 

His father worked as a typesetter for the Bradford Observer, and the story goes that he could read a newspaper backwards, upside-down, and back-to-front even on the press. This occupation, while still planting the family firmly in working-class ground, meant that Dick, and his little sister Annie, always had food in their stomachs, clothes on their backs, and went to school with shoes on their feet.

 They went went to Usher Street School, about a mile away from the terrace house in Quill Street where he was born and lived. The school, built in 1879 and now known as Bowling Park Primary, still stands, its slightly foreboding Yorkshire-sandstone buildings, typical of the working-class community-architecture of the era, are now at odds with the newly-painted bright blue doors and welcome signs. Its surroundings have altered somewhat, I'm sure, since his feet clattered across the yard, as just across the street from the main gates you'll now find a glass-works, a fitness centre, and a sikh temple.

I remember fondly his stories and his nonsensical sayings (If it takes a man a week to walk a fortnight…), but unraveling fact from fiction is, of course, even more impossible for me now than it was then. "Is that true, Grandad?" I would ask of some tale or other, but this would bring just a shrug of his shoulders or a smile and a nod.

I remember that one of his school-favourites was how the Master once stood in front of the class and, hovering one chalk-dusted hand over a map of the world showing England's empire highlighted in pink, brought the hand down in a long sweeping arc from Canada to Australia and asked, "Now, Children, d'ye see all that pink on there?"

"Yes, Sir," came the children's rote reply.

"That all belongs to us, that does!" The Teacher declared proudly, breathing in loudly through his nose and puffing out his chest as if he believed every word. But somehow the wealth of the colonies hadn't filtered down to home level yet; most of the kids in his class were in threadbare clothes with their "arses hangin' out o' their britches", and no proper shoes to go home in - only wooden clogs if they were lucky, and nothing at all on their feet if they weren't. 

Besides Colonial Affairs and geography, the backbone of learning at Usher Street was the Three Rs: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmatic and, as far as I remember, Dick was good at all three, but although his parents were relatively well-off, the thought of University or further education (if he even entertained such dreams) would have been out of the question, and he left school at fifteen.

He played football at school, and then later for Bradford Boys' Football Club. He would tell me how this coveted achievement meant you were headed for a career as a professional footballer as soon as you were noticed by a scout from one of the town's two professional clubs: Bradford City or Bradford Park Avenue; the scouts must have missed his best games because Bradford Boys' was as far as it went.

 

By the time I was born, Dick and my Grandma Olive were living in Fenby Avenue - less than two miles from Quill Street. As I got older, I would spend most weekends with them, and when the weather was fine, he and I would go for long walks around Bradford. The roads we walked must have been totally familiar to him - he played in these same streets and fields as a child - and we always found our way back home no matter where we were. We would walk past rows of silent sand-blasted terrace houses with tiny cemented or paved front yards, their gates closed, front doors locked, and curtains drawn across their bay-windows. "Shhh!" he would warn, "they're all on nights!" 

"Are they really all on nights, Grandad?" I would ask, only half believing him.

 

"Aye, lad. They must be." But I only smiled to myself, taking comfort in the ritual. 

 

Mostly we would take a football with us on these walks - in a Sandmartin's carrier bag that also held the cheese teacakes that my grandma had carefully wrapped in tinfoil - and kick it around on any open field that we found along the way. I clearly remember one Sunday afternoon - I would have been around eight or nine - I wanted to show him how my goalkeeping skills were coming along, but somehow we had forgotten the ball. So we walked for hours looking for a shop that was still open and had a ball to sell us - a combination not easily found on a Sunday in 1970s sub-urban Bradford. Eventually we found a corner shop that sold plastic balls  for a few pence. He bought one, and we played together on the brick-strewn barren landscape that was once Hepworths' Mill. As the day grew later the wind eventually came up. Playing havoc with the lightweight ball, it howled across the wasteland and through our hair; both of us without a care in the world and laughing like we'd just discovered the secret to eternal life.

We made our way home in the lowering dusk, and I asked him to explain how football had changed over the years and what it used to be like so long ago - of course, I'd heard it all before; I knew exactly what was coming: modern-day footballers like Kenny Dalglish and Kevin Keegan would have been no good at all in his day. For a start, they just weren't tough enough; they were too soft to kick a ball from yesteryear, never mind head one. A real ball made of heavy brown leather and sewn together with something resembling a shoelace was so heavy when it was raining that you needed steel-toed boots just to be able to kick it. And God help you if you went up for a header and the wet shoelace had come loose and whipped you across t' for'ead, or, even worse, your cheek or your eye.

Of course, he knew as well as I that modern footballers didn't use their toes to kick a ball, but he loved telling the story as much as I loved hearing it...

Copyright © 2014 David Rhodes All Rights Reserved.

Author's Note

My very first attempt at writing. Please, be honest. Would love meaningful criticism.