Growing up in Robin Hoods Bay

 My brother is an entertaining writer of short stories, Here  is one on our childhood memories.

Memories

Memory is a funny thing.  As my mother entered her final years, she seemed to have an incredible recall of events and people from over 80 years in the past.  Whilst still aware enough to remember who the prime minister was, she would have trouble remembering what had happened to her in the last week.

 

My memory for some things is poor; I am dreadful at remembering names.  I can recall that I know the face, but often not the association or the name.  On the other hand, my wife’s memory for names and faces is amazing.  She still on occasions meets and remembers people who she knew at primary school.

 

I can remember numbers, places, names of places and events.  It probably says a lot about the kind of people we are.  My wife is a warm, friendly people person.  I can remember numbers.

 

But the purpose of this piece is to recount some of the memories of my childhood.  Some I certainly remember, some may be that I remember what I have been told.  I am describing events before I was 9 when the family lived in Robin Hoods Bay prior to our move to Middlesbrough.

 

Robin Hoods Bay on the Yorkshire coast grew up in 3 phases.  Early settlers were subsistence farmers living high above the coast in fear of Viking raiders, fishing when weather permitted.  Once it was safe to do so they moved down to the coast.  The wide bay has three streams cutting through the soft cliffs of shale and clay.  They chose the northernmost and built their houses astride the steep sided beck. In appearance it looks as though a child had spilled their toy houses and they lay where they landed.  Later still the Victorians built a railway and started to construct a more orderly village near the station on top of the steep bank that led down to the old village. 

 

Fishing boats would be drawn up in a square at the village foot where a slipway led down to the beach beside the culverted stream.  At high tide the sea rose up the slipway and in stormy weather flooded the square.  At low tide sands lay at the foot of the cliffs on either side of the village.  Rocky outcrops or scaurs lay in parallel bands angling out from the beach.

 

This long hot summer we have enjoyed brings to mind another one – 1947.  But it is that winter, which brings up a memory.  At that time my father was still in the RNR, having been drafted in 1939 from his position as a Merchant Navy Officer.  His role involved him travelling from one naval dockyard to another adjusting magnetic compasses on naval vessels.  He managed to get home most weekends.  But there was one weekend that he got home and was trapped.  The tale was told that the village was cut off for six weeks.  Huge drifts blocked both the rail line from Whitby and Scarborough and the roads over the moors.  My memory testifies to this. 

 

Running short of fresh meat my Dad elected to take his shotgun onto the cliffs and try and bag a rabbit or two for the pot.  He took me along well wrapped up against the snow.  I would be 5 and it is a bit of a mystery why he decided that watching him shoot rabbits was good for my education.  In the event we didn’t get any.  Whilst tramping along the cliff top in the snow I tripped over something.  Dad picked me up, brushed me down, and scraped away the snow to reveal what it was that had felled me.  It was the top of a telegraph pole.  The phone line followed the railway line and at this point it was in a cutting that was completely filled with a snowdrift.

 

I have another incident in the snow, but this would be later in about 1950.  Having been allowed to move away from the Bay School, where I had started my education at the age of 6, I now walked to Thorpe School with my brother and one of his friends. The journey was about ¾ mile and involved walking up a steep bank just passed the railway bridge on Thorpe Lane.  We had trudged through the hard packed snow as far as the bank. As we started on the bank a United bus drove up behind us.  We thought it would be a good idea to get a help up the hill so as the bus slowed down to gingerly climb up the bank we clung onto the back and let it tow us up.  It did seem a good idea at the time, but the bus driver had an alternative view.  Before we had got to the school half a mile away he had stopped there and reported our escapade to the headmaster.

 

On arriving we were summoned to the front of the boys assembly.  Not as intimidating as you might think, there were probably only about 30 children.  The headmaster said he had a mind to punish us for our foolhardiness and asked us which punishment we would select. Being new to the school I was uncertain what he meant by this, but he soon revealed his intent.  He opened a cupboard to display his armoury.  It contained a thin Malacca cane, a walking stick, a leather strap, a plimsoll, a riding crop and a shepherds ‘hezzle’ or hazel walking pole.

 

Being the new boy, I was asked first and deliberated my choice.  I knew the Malacca cane would sting, as would the riding crop.  I settled for the hezzle.  He asked me to explain my choice, and I said that I believed it would hurt less than the others.  Turning to the school he asked them if they agreed with my selection.  To a boy they confirmed that my judgement was misplaced.  I shivered with dread anticipation.  In the event the headmaster then decided to let us off with a caution.

 

A similar recollection from these wintry days was batting to school through heavy snow and arriving cold and wet.  We were told to remove our coats and dry them near the potbellied stove that supplied the room with heat.  Once we were warm and the clothes a bit drier we were packed off to trudge our way back home through the driving snow.

 

On the way to school we had passed the local church St. Stephens, known as the village cathedral because of its classic imposing structure.  In the late 19^th century it replaced, for regular worship, the old church, high above the village.  Close by the church was the vicarage, another good example of Victorian architecture.  It was here that I enjoyed or endured, you may choose, two of life experiences.

 

My mother was a fine pianist and organist and often played the organ at church.  She was keen for her sons to be part of the church music experience.  My older brother was already in the choir, and it was my turn to audition.  I was an altogether different proposition.  Shy, lacking in confidence, and with a marked stammer, I was unable to produce a single note at the audition in front of the vicar’s wife.  I was thus destined never to grace the choir stalls. 

 

I did grace the vicar’s lawn though, or maybe that should be disgrace.  Every Whitsuntide the vicar held a garden party in the grounds of the vicarage.  One of the highlights of the event was maypole dancing.  Quite how the vicar rationalised this ancient form of pagan symbolism with his Christian duties is not recorded.  The weaving of intricate patterns and the successful un-weaving appealed to my senses.  Unfortunately, I did not always get it right and the chaos that can ensue when a young boy takes the wrong step on the unwinding can be hilarious – for the onlookers.  Apart from the boy’s mother that is.

 

I started school when I was 6, delayed due to a bout of pneumonia.  My education had been at home, and I apparently developed reasonable reading skills and the ability to knit.  My reading ability resulted in a change in my grandfather’s choice of Sunday reading.  I can remember the incident, but the result was explained to me many years later.  Reading the paper one weekend I pointed out to my mother that the paper had made a misprint.  They had spelled the word six with an e instead of an i.  My grandfather’s copy of the News of the World was cancelled forthwith.

 

Our papers were delivered by Bill Brown who ran one of the village shops.  He also delivered groceries for Uncle Dan.  He wasn’t really an uncle, just the husband of a lifelong friend of my mother.  He ran the village grocers and post office.   Part of his trade was to provide a grocery service to the many farms that dotted the hillside from Ravenscar to Ness Point.  He walked up to each farm once a week and took orders from the farmer or his wife.  The orders were assembled and then delivered by Bill Brown in his old, battered Armstrong Siddely, whose rear doors were tied together with cord.

 

My role in all this I shared with my brother.  We helped Uncle Dan assemble the orders after school. We weighed sugar into blue paper bags, and flour into brown ones.  Tea was scooped out of the tea chest and weighed into packets, which were then carefully folded to prevent spillage.  I carved and weighed lumps of lard, margarine and butter from large slabs and neatly wrapped them in greaseproof paper.  Shelves were trawled for tins of peas and peaches, jars of meat paste and pickled onions, and the haul was packed neatly into cardboard boxes. But the best job was grinding the coffee beans on the big old grinder.  The wonderful smell is to me the best part of coffee, more preferable than the taste.

 

I received no pay for this work, a dip into a sweet jar was all I could expect or wish for.  My mother reaped the benefit through Dan’s generosity with his groceries and his surplus eggs when the hens were laying well.  I suspect also that my mother’s food ration coupons had a degree of elasticity.  It was with Dan that we learned an early lesson in animal husbandry.  Once his hens were no longer able to produce eggs they were promptly despatched.  Dan showed us the most effective way to wring a chicken’s neck.

 

There are other memories of my childhood, which I have known for a long time was a very precious and privileged time in my life.  Catching lobsters and collecting winkles on the shore; Christmas Masonic parties; the deadly scourge of polio; penny bread loaves, fleeing from strange men and arson.

It was inevitable that as children we would spend a lot of our spare time on the beach, particularly in holiday time.  We would spend this time largely unsupervised, generally 4 or 5 of us in a small group of mixed ages, but all under the age of 12.  The bay had notorious tides patterns, which each summer managed to strand some holidaymaker on the scaurs requiring them to swim to safety and occasionally they needed recovering by boat.  Somehow we kids already knew the dangers and managed to watch out for each other as we gathered winkles, sea urchins or fished for crabs and lobsters.

 

Winkles were taken home, boiled and after seasoning with salt and vinegar eaten with a pin. Getting the winkle out of its shell is a simple matter of skewering the end, twisting and pulling before discarding the flat cap that seals the flesh in the shell. Sea urchins were a different matter.  These provided us with the pocket money that we could spend at Trillos ice cream van to be found on the beach most holidays.  Both on the beach in the high season and in a small shop in the village a local man, a real ancient to us youngsters sold the sea urchins, gutted, stripped of their spines and polished.  He then filled them with small bunches of coastal flowers such as thrift, samphire and sea lavender and sold them to holidaymakers.

 

Crabs and lobsters were taken home to eat.  The local fishermen caught them in lobster pots, but we and other villagers used our crab hooks. Getting your own crab hook was a rite of passage for children.  The hook was a broomstick with a metal spike on the end twisted into a hook. The technique was to follow the tide as it ebbed and start poking your hook into crevices under the rocky scaurs.  Both crabs and lobsters objected to this intrusion into their premises and grabbed the hook with their claw.  The task was to gently tease them out of their hole, bind their claws with string and drop them into your bucket. Memory tells me that we got loads.  The reality is that we probably had many more failures than successes.  We also had to follow the conservation rules, which prevented us taking immature specimens.  Immature lobsters were called ninties by the local fishermen for some reason.

 

We must have had some success, as I recall that summer evening meals sometimes comprised a large bowl of salad, local bread, more of this later, and a cooked lobster on each plate.  It was a matter of pride to extract as much flesh as possible using only a teaspoon.

 

When the tide was in we played on the cliffs and beside the village stream until we were banned from doing so.  This arose when one of our extended gang contracted infantile paralysis, or polio as it came to be known.  It was believed that she contracted the disease from the stream, which probably served as a sewer for half the village and farms further up into the hills.  The fear in the village was palpable and as a young boy I was aware of this.  Fortunately, no one else became ill and Ailsa remained isolated until her sad early death as a teenager.

 

The other illness that haunted us from these times was TB. My brother had an infected gland in his neck removed and for years the family were regularly screened for the disease.  The source of the illness was never established, but we all drank milk delivered directly from the farm.  The milkman, old Len, walked the streets with a yoke across his back carrying two pails of milk.  He ladled your requirements into your jugs from his standard measures, in pints not litres.

 

The cliffs in spring were carpeted with primroses, and one day my brother and I gathered fists full to give to our mother on Mothers Day.  My brother had a little wheelbarrow made by a joiner friend of our parents.  We decided that this would make a good receptacle for our gift.  However, once we placed in our primroses the gift looked a bit sparse.  The primroses needed augmenting, and we found some daffodils in a field along Church Lane.  These were nearer than another trip to the cliffs for primroses.  It was later that we were told that we should never ever consider taking flowers from the churchyard.

 

But life was not all fun. One of the local tradesmen, the coal man if memory serves me right came with a health warning. Our parents advised us that we boys should stay away from him.  Why this was so was never explained, adulthood provided the answer. One late Autumn afternoon I was returning home when he appeared behind me and called out.  What he said or what his   intentions were I have no notion.  I had just one idea.  To run for home.  I was soon there but in my headlong flight I misjudged my turn into the drive and ran headlong into the gate.  Within minutes I had a lump the size of a hen’s egg on my forehead and my mother soothing it with a cold compress.

 

In those days the village had a thriving year-round population and was well served by local shops.  These include a shoe shop, grocer and general dealer, a milliner and fabric shop, newsagents, butchers, wet and fried fish shops, cafes and bakeries.  It is the last of these that gave me a lifelong taste for fresh, home baked bread.  On the way home from school, when I was about 6 or 7, I would call in to collect the bread ordered by my mother.  I would also get a penny loaf.  This was a miniature loaf about three inches long.  They were still warm from the oven, and I would eat it as I climbed the bank to home.  The Hovis advert filmed in Shaftesbury is redolent of this memory.

 

The smell of the warm bakery reminds me of another smell, in an altogether different setting.  One of my sons recently described his love of the coal and log fire he now lovingly tenders in his Victorian house.  He believes that all men are at heart closet pyromaniacs.  This may stem from the racial memory that man was responsible for providing the fire for warmth and cooking.  Whatever the reason I too have the love of fire.  Many a happy hour has been spent in feeding garden fires in the days before they became antisocial.  It all started as a young boy.  I was probably eight years old.

 

I was accompanied and maybe encouraged in this joint venture by my cousin Liz and best friend Richard.  We bought a box of matches at the Top Shop, so named as it was at the top of the bank in the village.  Oddly there was no complementary Bottom Shop.  Or maybe this is not so surprising.  Such a purchase by children was not questioned, as our parents often sent us on such errands.  We walked out of the village on the cliffs to the north of the bay.  The railway line ran along the cliff top between arable crops on the landward side and fields dotted with sheep and stands of gorse bushes, towards the sea.

 

Our game was to set light to the dry grass at the base of the gorse bush and then stamp it out before it set light to the bush itself. This worked very well, and we enjoyed the few miniature blazes as we moved from bush to bush. We got a bit bolder each time until the inevitable happened. We couldn’t stamp it out and we learned one of the wonders of nature.  When a gorse bush sets afire it does so in an explosive manner. Faced with this conflagration we did what every arsonist would do in the circumstances, we ran like hell back to the village. With great presence of mind, we threw away the box of matches as we fled. Nearing the village, we heard the siren of the fire alarm, so we made our way to the fire station and then followed the crowd and the fire crew back upon to the cliffs to watch them extinguish our fire. 

 

Another act of destruction, and of this I have no memory was one Christmas, probably 1948.  The story was related by my mother to anyone who was prepared to listen to her tales of the perils of raising boys.  Apparently my brother and I were keen to own a cardigan.  Granny sharpened her knitting needles and set to with a will.  Eventually Father Christmas brought us each a hand-knitted Fair Isle patterned - sweater.  But we wanted cardigans.  The solution was clear, and I credit my brother with the solution.  Despite being left-handed my 8-year-old brother made judicious use of the kitchen scissors, and we had our cardigans.  Granny left in tears.

 

About two doors away on Church lane was a relation of my Mothers, with the quaint nickname of Chipping Hammer Tommy.  He was a retired ship’s captain and acquired his name due to his diligence in keeping his ships in tip top condition.  To do this he insisted that the crew made full use of chipping hammers to remove old, chipped paint and rust.  His desire to keep his paintwork up to scratch resulted in one of my first DIY jobs at the age of 8.  Quite how everyone thought it was a good idea to allow such a young child loose with a tin of green paint and a garden gate in need of a touch up I have no idea.  However, by all accounts the task was completed satisfactorily, and I eventually returned to my natural colour.

 

Christmas in these austere days in the late 40’s were grim. A large present was an enormous treat, what we usually got was a sock filled with oranges and nuts.  I do remember receiving a gantry crane one Christmas. This could move across the floor, and the crane hoist could lift and move the length of the crane.  It provided many hours of fun.  Another regular event at this time of year was the Masonic Christmas party.  This was usually held in Whitby, and we children travelled through by bus.  I have little memory of the details apart from receiving a Dinky toy of an army lorry that had a detachable hood.

 

We lived in my grandfather’s house, we, being my mother, brother and I and late in the 40’s my two younger sisters. Dad worked away a lot of the time.  One task that was allocated to my grandfather was to take his two grandsons to have their hair cut in Whitby.  The journey was by train.  Our role as boys was to watch for the train leaving Ravenscar station across the bay, which signalled the time we needed to walk up to the station.  Apparently at the barber’s I was a fidgeter and far from his favourite client.  He mounted us on a plank laid across the arms of his barber’s chair, and set to with his scissors, trying hard to avoid cutting my ears.  Our reward for enduring the ordeal was a visit to the Smugglers Café with Granddad to enjoy a drink and admire the many ships in a bottle which were on sale to customers.

 

This village life changed when the family moved to Middlesbrough soon after my 9^th birthday.  Although we lost the freedom that the village gave us, our new home in Middlesbrough was at that time at the limit of Middlesbrough’s urban expansion.  Fields at the bottom of the garden, a stream 100 yards along the road, and woods and playing fields, little further away allowed us to continue in some measure the childhood freedom we had taken for granted.  The promise of a bicycle if we achieved success in the 11+ would allow us to explore even further afield.

 

 

 

 

 

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