Every Friday night Mam went through our hair with a fine toothcomb, looking for nits, but before that ordeal we had to have a bath. All the hot water had to be boiled on the stove. One enterprising chap invented the rocking tin bath, with a curved bottom so you rocked the bath back and forth, economically swilling a minimum of hot water all over your body. But this was not for us we didn’t even have a normal non-rocking static tin bath. We had to make do with a zinc-galvanised barrel called a dolly tub; the same one Mam washed the clothes in.

After our bath we were dried with what are now called, ‘Exfoliating towels.’ Then all the towels, I can remember were, ‘Extra exfoliating towels,’ in other words rough as a rasp. Their function wasn’t just to dry but to remove layers of skin with any stuck on germs. The towels were in fact more akin to cloth cheese graters than the towels we know today. In fact I seem to remember Granny peeling new potatoes with one. When you were dried with one of these towels you weren’t just dry, you were a peeled person.
We also used exfoliating hairbrushes. Ours was similar to a hand mirror with a domed rubber bit instead of a glass. Sticking out of the rubber weren’t softy bristles but lots of metal spikes like a Fakir’s bed. I think it was inspired by an ancient folk memory, before brushes were invented and hair was brushed with a dead hedgehog. Mam would vigorously brush my hair with this thing. The spikes would scrape my scalp; the loose skin would fall like snow. Mam would look shocked and say, “Scurf.”

It sounded serious; for long enough I wasn’t sure if it was one of her made up words. I couldn’t ask anybody, they’d laugh if it wasn’t a real word and be suspicious if it was. Even if they didn’t know what it was they wouldn’t want to catch it. I’d be shunned if they weren’t sure. What if it got worse would I have to have my head painted with ‘Gentian violet’ like the kid at school with ringworm? (An early form of biological corn circle.) Then I heard of scurvy, had I got scurvy was that what Mam meant? Five months without fruit and you got scurvy. My life was fairly fruit free and the cure was to eat lots of fruit, particularly limes. How could I eat more fruit? I’d never seen a lime. The only lime I knew was the stuff they whitewashed the cellars with. It was years before I found out, scurf was what we now call dandruff.
Mam also used the brush as an information retrieval system. If she wanted information she would threaten to smack me with the flat side. If she was really serious she’d show me the spiked side. Then I’d tell her Granny had eaten the biscuits; she wouldn’t dare threaten her with the brush. Once I tried to simulate measles by beating my arms with the spiked side but it was too painful. I daren’t do it on my face, I hadn’t forgotten about the blind piano tuner.

The dodgy thing about hair washing was water temperature control. The water was boiled in the kettle. Mam’s usual method of testing the temperature was to stick her elbow in the water. She couldn’t of course do this with the kettle. She’d usually test it on the back of her hand, which was not very sensitive and sometimes she didn’t even bother doing that. In other households if the person you’re pouring on starts screaming this is a sure indication the water is too hot. This obviously didn’t work with my deaf Mam. So the moment just before she poured the water was always very worrying. Usually she got it right but occasionally we ended up with glowing sterilised scalps. The nit comb was very painful those nights.
Hair drying was most fun. The towel was put over my head. I held the two corners at the front whilst Mam held the two at the back and by pulling up and down, like milking a two-teat cow; my hair was dry in no time at all. Then I was put in my, ‘Liberty bodice.’ This was like a short sleeved thick vest fastened up to the neck with rubber buttons. The only thing that was liberty about it was it was too short and your willy was at liberty to be viewed by anyone. I think the later popularity of the, ‘Teddy Boy,’ long jacket style was due to the deep trauma inflicted by the ‘Liberty bodice.’ Little boys all wanted longer ‘Liberty bodices,’ in fact drape ‘Liberty bodices.’ When they grew up their subconscious memory recalled the indignity of the short ‘Liberty bodice’ giving them a deep-seated desire to wear drape jackets.

Actors in tights have the same problem; I remember being advised to make sure you got a long doublet or learn to strategically place a pair of rolled up socks. A clean unworn pair was the best; thus the attraction of the enlarged pubic area was not spoilt by an olfactory contraceptive effect of sweaty socks. Old theatrical wardrobe tights usually have worn out elastic round the top. Once I had to wear a pair of these slack top tights. An old hand at the game (thirteen year old!) said, “I always use ha’pennies on slack tight tops.”
This I took to mean, you slid ha' pennies round the empty slot and used them like buttons with your braces. I know there are clip-on braces but we didn’t have them then. Unfortunately I only had two ha’pennies probably my church collection money. I managed to scrounge a safety pin. The braces I fastened to the two coins at the front and the back I secured with the safety pin.

During the performance, I was a demon writhing about on the floor the safety pin came undone and stuck in my back. I then became the best demon writhing in the agony of hell because I wasn’t acting. I was in agony; the pin was firmly stuck, out of reach, at the top of my back. When it came to the part where the demons had to stand up and shuffle off. I noticed I was getting curious looks from the audience. I would have liked to think it was admiration for my agonised performance. I looked down, because the braces had come off the back of the tights the front had dropped giving me an exaggerated crutch. I heard some one chunter,
“Over done it a bit with the socks haven’t you?”
Over forty years later on Sunday 16th of January 2000, I was talking to Ron and Margaret Maris about the trick of using coins on slack tight tops.
Ron said, “I remember, you put a penny in the slot twist it round to take up the slack then you tuck the coin and twisted bit in the waist band.”
I’d got it wrong. I some times wonder if I’ve misunderstood anything else and it will all come to me on my deathbed when it’s too late.

Friday night, after the bath, was ‘Amami’ night. ‘Amami’ was a scented green hair setting lotion. I think it was made from gum tragacanth, a kind of glue. I thought the idea was that if Mum missed a nit this stuff glued it to your head so at least you didn’t give it to someone else. Whilst this was going on Gran would be outside preventing, ‘The Angel of Death’ and his germs passing over our doorstep. She did this with what appeared to be milk. She didn’t use the ancient traditional method of painting a cross on the door. She made absolutely sure by dousing the entire stone step with this milk. She always had a milk bottle of this liquid with her. Later I found out it was watered down ‘Dettol’. She washed the steps in this disinfectant so the germs wouldn’t get in. I suppose it worked for the germs on foot but we had to take our chances with the flying ones. We didn’t have an ‘Air-wick’. That was a bottle, which had a disinfectant soaked felt wick you pulled up out of the top. This covered up smells and killed flying germs. Despite this, not only the first born, but the second born survived. When the steps were thoroughly scrubbed she then rubbed the edges with a white stone till there was a nice white line round them. That told the germs so far and no further. The main part of the step she’d rub with yellow stone. I suppose this was if any did get through they would leave tiny yellow footprints. These stones were called donkey stones. Incidentally there’s a pub on Manchester airport called, ‘The Donkey Stone’.
You got your donkey stones from the rag and bone man who came round with a donkey cart shouting; “Rag, Bones.”
They were called, ‘Donkey stones’ because that was one of the brand names, ‘Donkey Brand’ nothing at all to do with donkeys. You would give the ragman all your moth eaten woollies usually cardigans that you couldn’t use for the rag rugs or if your Mam wasn’t around a second best unloved balaclava. He would give your Mam a white or yellow donkey stone in exchange and you’d some times get a balloon. He’d then be off luring moths into the next street shouting.
“Rag, Bones.”
No one ever gave him bones as far as I remember. Perhaps this is why the knick-knack bones have vanished from the music shops. Some said the bones were for making glue. Perhaps that’s why we don’t see the stronger hair setting lotions anymore. Any transaction you had with the ragman was better done quickly. The donkey was usually swarming with flies, carriers of disease. Hadn’t plague come up from London in old clothes? They’d had plague in the old days at Hepworth, just outside Huddersfield. Hepworth was a long way off, probably a couple of trolley bus rides away but who knew where this ragman came from. We all knew he wasn’t a local ragman. Ben Shaw’s horse could get from Huddersfield to deliver the pop; perhaps a fit donkey could get further.

We all knew it was a long way from Nazareth to Bethlehem but we’d been told a fat lady on a donkey had made it. These donkeys were obviously fitter than they looked. Stood to reason, didn’t they use them on the beaches in Blackpool? Nothing second rate in Blackpool. Donkeys were important hadn’t the Germans bombed Meltham and strangely the only casualty was Dick Cummins’s, donkey Daisy. Obviously a great propaganda coup, the Germans must have known that Daisy pulled the ice cream cart.

Wherever the ragman came from he wasn’t trusted. They said he wet the rags and put stones in the pockets so they weighed heavier when he resold them. Not a bad idea but we couldn’t get away with doing the same to him. He only seemed to come in fine weather. Was there plague on the cart perhaps there were germs in one of the cardigan pockets? Definite contenders were those unsavoury knicker pockets. This fear of catching things was very real; diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, ringworm, polio, fleas, nits and scabies were all about us. We were spared ‘Tsu Tsu Gamushi’ fever but very little else. ‘Coughs and sneezes spread diseases’ we were constantly being told and the solution was to, ‘Trap your germs on a handkerchief’. Then what did you do when you’d trapped them? Mam took no chances she boiled them in salt water.

Then there was rickets I remember seeing old ladies with incredible bowlegs caused by rickets. Unkind folk would remark,
“They couldn’t stop a pig in a passage.”
The real scary diseases were the ones without symptoms. You didn’t know you’d got it until you suddenly died. There was a lot of that about.
Mam told me Granddad would not allow the family to be vaccinated or inoculated against anything. She carried on this tradition after he died. My arms are unmarked to this day unlike all my contemporaries.

We couldn’t have, ‘National Dried Milk.’ He said it was charity. Mam forgot about Granddad when it came to getting that delicious concentrated orange juice and later, school milk. It was a miracle we survived. Paranoia was our preventative; we had it drummed into us not to put on other kids hats, drink out of bottles or other people’s cups and never to take a bite out of any thing already bitten. I remember drinking my school milk and another kid complaining that'd mistakenly picked up his part drunk bottle. I'd sucked his straw I was terrified, that was it, the end.

Dad, during the war, looking down a bomb hole in Meltham, near Huddersfield

I was like, Quee Queg; in ‘Moby Dick’ I just sat down and waited to die. I'm still waiting. When I do die, I know deep down the rot set in when I drank that diseased kid’s milk.
Our family was not alone in its paranoia. One woman wouldn’t let her children go into public toilets in the town. The reason wasn’t like today in case they met someone nasty but in case they caught something nasty or as we thought something nasty caught them. Wasn’t it written on toilet walls everywhere?
‘It’s no use standing on the seat the crabs in here can jump six feet, (183cms.,).’
We knew all about crabs, we’d seen huge dead ones at the crab dressers on Pong Alley and you wouldn’t want any part of you caught in the claws of one of those chaps. So this woman wisely wouldn’t let her kids go into public toilets. Unkind people said the real reason was that their father wanted the extra sewage for his allotment and the family needed the pee for a severe attack of suicidaly itchy chilblains. Their argument was strengthened by the fact that the father had never been known to run out when the ragman’s donkey relieved itself outside his house. Horse muck, or in this case donkey muck, was much prized. If it was deposited outside your house there was an unspoken law, which said you had first claim to it.

Dad, in later years,
looking suspiciously at a mine

It was a sort of, ‘Droit de Dung.’ The denizens would rush out, with their, third from posh, coal shovel and like dung beetles collect their steaming prize to spread on their allotment vegetables.
Which gave rise to the joke;

"Where are you going with that horse muck?”
“I’m going to put it on my rhubarb.”
“On your rhubarb! We put custard on ours.”

Everyone desperately wanted horse muck but not the paranoia poo poo family. The donkey muck would stay in the road. The steam from it would drift away, it would cool. Curtains would twitch; they were watching and waiting. The bus to Rastrick would pass and flatten it and return to flatten it again and again. They would wait till dark to be sure he wasn’t coming out. Many buses would pass over it squeezing out the plant nourishing juices. The dung would spread flatter. Night would fall.

In the morning the pizza shaped poo would have gone. Stolen, to be crumbled up like a dry popadom onto some ailing carrots or perhaps cut into insoles for some short kids shoes. Didn’t adults always say, ‘We’ll put some horse muck in your shoes that’ll make you grow”? It worked with parsnip why not with people. The treasured donkey dung had gone.

They all went back to waiting for his next visit or the more frequent summer visitor, Ripley’s ice cream cart. He had a pony and came all the way from Hove Edge.

BAD NEWS FOR ROSE GROWERS CYCLE

Years later I was listening to the news on the radio. The news reader was telling us about an earthquake in South America, a famine in Africa and a rail crash in India. He then paused to get his priorities right and said, “And now; some bad news for cricketers.” I began to think of the importance of things and the Thornhill Road fanatical quest for horse muck. This led me to build the mechanical horse cycle I called, ‘Bad News for Rose Growers,’ The Duke of Bedford bought one and James Mason another.

Wilf's new book 'My Best Cellar' (his autobiography up to the age of eleven) can now be ordered online. £ 9.99   download book sample here

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