Memoirs of GD Fell

We also played with whips and tops. The top was a cone shaped piece of wood with a point on the end, which you started spinning by hand and then kept it spinning by using the whip on it. The object was to keep the top spinning for as long as possible.

Hide and seek was always a popular game which I suppose still carries on, I doubt if it will ever disappear altogether with children of all ages, mainly the very young of course.

Street lighting was by gaslight, not electric, and the lamps were activated by a toggle switch. A man, who was called the lamplighter, used to come along just before dusk with a pole which had a hook on the end. He would pull the toggle switch down one way to turn the lamp on. At dawn, he would come and pull the toggle the other way to turn it off. Many is the time when he would come at dusk to find that the light was already on. Someone had climbed up the pole and switched it on already. I wonder who that can have been.

There was no such thing as mobile phones in those days. The mobile phone had not been invented. Most houses, which included ours, didn’t have a phone at all. If you needed to use a phone you had to resort to the public telephone boxes of which there were quite a number. To use the phone you had to pay by putting money into a slot, dial the number and when the person on the other end answered you pressed button ‘A’. The money then disappeared and you were through to speak. If there was no answer you pressed button ‘B’ and your money was returned. As children, we used to go into the phone boxes, press button ‘B’

hoping that the previous person who had put money in, had not got through and had forgotten to press button ‘B’. Sometimes it worked and we got a jackpot of 2d or so… The boy’s weeklies which I used to read avidly were the Adventure, the Wizard, the Rover, the Hotspur and the Skipper. Of course I couldn’t afford to buy them and relied on getting the occasional one from one of my friends ….until, one Friday I was coming home from school having taken a shortcut through a back lane where the dustbins had been put out for collection and saw one of these luxury items hanging out from under the lid of the dustbin. This was too good an opportunity to be missed, so I opened the lid and found the whole week’s issues of all five weeklies. Next week I checked the bin, and again, there was a whole week’s supply of all the issues. Needless to say it then became a regular event, even to the point of making the pilgrimage on school holidays.

On Mondays and Fridays, a cattle market was held in Carlisle, and as the way through the market cut off quite a distance from the journey between school and home, it made sense to go through the market rather than go around it. There was never any selling between 12 o’clock and 2 o’clock, so I had a clear run through the market both ways. In those days I could never resist kicking an object as I was running and sometimes I would see a cigarette packet lying on the ground. This of course was a target too good to pass up.