News Back lane games of summers gone
With school holidays getting under way once again, occasional Goole Times contributor MIKE MARSH recalls school summer holidays in Goole almost 60 years ago.
No i-Pods in those days. No mobile 'phones. No text messages. No computer games. And for most of our schooldays, not one house in the street with a television set. But when our six-week break from school loomed in and around Goole in the 1940s, and early Fifties, those of us who were young then were every bit as enthusiastic for 'the great escape' as any generation which has followed.
Adults groaned. Some dreaded every minute. But to kids like us it seemed that a six-week span free from the shackles of school was as good as life might ever get to be.
We might have had no fancy gadgets to play with. Yet, in a back lane such as that between Goole's Third and Fourth Avenues, a ball and a bit of imagination were all that we required.
Early in the summer holidays, it was cricket every day the weather permitted. Except at weekends, when some of us were despatched to Sunday School. And those who were not were generally kept indoors as part of the decorum of the day.
For much of our back-lane cricket the bat was no more than a roughly-shaped piece of wood. The dust-bin used for the Council's pig-food collection would be the wickets.
Some matches would last all day - not just two innings a side, but 15 or 20. Sometimes the arguments over who had won lasted from one match to the next.
The rules were simple: LBW decisions were decided by who could shout the loudest - batsman or bowler. After the ball had bounced off a coalhouse roof, a catch had to be made one-handed. Hitting the ball into a backyard was counted as a four, but three 'yarders' meant the batsman was dismissed as 'run out'.
Sometimes all players had to make a run for it if the ball bashed into a back yard cracked or broke a window - or when a batsman hit it over the houses. That feat prompted a '12 and out' decision and when it happened there was a race to the front street to retrieve the ball before anyone else could get their hands on it.
Eventually these summer holiday games took on a more official nature when one of us acquired a cricket scorebook. Not only could we work out averages then but we also had a record of how games progressed or ended: "Match abandoned - Mr ------- refused to give us our ball back", or "Coalman's horse and cart stopped play" were not uncommon.
Later in our six weeks of school-free heaven, thoughts turned to football and the approaching new season. A bigger ball was required then - and coats to serve as goalposts. Again, matches could last all day - with an additional halftime always taken if anyone spotted the Doubtfires' ice cream-man.
Another holiday attraction was pea-pulling. With a stool, a packed lunch of Spam sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade, off we would go to some field outside town, to return home with back-ache and earnings garnered at the rate of what today would be ten pence a bag, sometimes less.
Games in the back lane, though, were always the main holiday attraction - except when we began to take our football so seriously that we would head off to play on the grass of West Park.
From our part of town getting there meant a long walk up Centenary Road, but we would put that time to good use by debating the great issues of our time. Such as what girls could possibly see in playing with a skipping rope, or collecting pictures of hair dos and wedding dresses.
Then there was the question as to why girls were no good at football (in our back lane Mavis T was the only girl any good at cricket) or what pleasure they could possibly derive from playing 'Doctors and Nurses'?
In time most of us changed our opinions about girls, but not about six-week holidays from school in those slower, simpler, softer summers of long, long ago.
Published on 26th July 2007 in News.
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