Ray Jewbell recalls continuous football and the local baker paying him and his friends to clean up the manure left by the baker’s horses - only to use it as fertiliser on his father’s rhubarb.
Ray, now sixty-three, remembers playing football on his street with up to ten friends. ‘We’d get moaned at for playing footie near someone’s garden, so we’d play on the street. Then we’d get moaned at for playing in the road.’ Ray would play football continuously until he had to go indoors for meals. ‘Even after tea we’d come back out and play more.’
What Ray remembers the most is the amount of dogs in the streets when he was young, ‘there’s no dogs on the streets anymore. Back then they used to chase the cyclists down the street and the cyclists would have to kick them away.’
Ray was born in World War Two and his memories of that period of time are among his earliest. ‘I remember the V1 and V2 planes flying back to Britain when I was about two years old, I got out the taxi wearing my little welly boots and they came whooming over.’ Ray’s father made the same bombers that he saw that day, ‘my dad was injured in world war one and he was at home for the second time around.’
When both the baker and the milkman would come by on their horse and carts, Ray would scoop up the manure that the horses left and use it as fertiliser in his dad’s rhubarb garden ‘he [the milkman or baker] used to pay us six-pence and we’d put it [the manure] straight on our garden.’
