trip to Crystal Palace, and all the boys lined up and the teacher gave you a brand-new sixpence each. And the monitor got one and sixpence. We marched to Aldgate Station or Liverpool Street Station. I remember the first time I saw the train.
Ellen Clark
We lived next door to an engineer, and every Christmas Eve he used to send his daughter round and she would ask my sister and I to their house. They would have 2 lb of the best raisins and they put them on a plate and they put some rum over them and they set light to them. The first time we saw this, we daren't touch them – we were frightened, so the other girls were eating them all. So the mother said, ‘What's the matter with you Barbara and Mary Ellen?’ And her daughter said, ‘They're frightened to touch them’. ‘Oh’ she said, ‘Get on with them – they'll not hurt you!’ So we tried them and after that we didn't stop.
Tom Kirk
In 1908 I remember staying with the Robsons, a wealthy family in Stockton. I arrived at noon to hear that Sidney, the second son, had been locked in his bedroom with bread and water because he had tortured a cat. Meanwhile, Marjorie, Sidney's sister, was left alone with me. She suggested that we should change clothes. Not realising what this implied, I was starting to strip off, when her mother came in and marched me off to another room where she gave me a lecture on sex. Later that summer, when Sidney was again locked up for some misdemeanour, a game of hide and seek was organised and Marjorie disappeared. Some time later, she was found lying beside a haystack in the arms of a naked farmhand.
Arthur Harding
We used to do a trick – a bloody dangerous trick and all. We'd pin a sheet of paper on a bloke's back when he was in a crowd and we'd set light to the paper at the bottom. I had two pals – Wally Shepherd and Billy Warner. They both got knocked out in the First World War. Billy was a diddicoy – a gypsy who'd settled down – and the three of us were always up to bloody mischief.
Thomas Henry Edmed
A gang of us went into Windsor Park and we walked miles and found this hut. It was a carpenter's hut and inside it, there was everything; beautifully polished saws, choppers, axes, chisels and screwdrivers. It was the most elaborate place. What we did to that hut was really dreadful. We left the lot all piled in a heap in the middle. The police never found out who did it.
Sonia Keppel
At first, the Christmas holidays seemed to have a movable background. At the age of three, I spent them at Gopsall, where lived Lord and Lady Howe, and where I have no recollection of anything except of an enormous grown-up, fancy-dress dinner party on Christmas Eve. To this I was brought down, dressed up as an Admiral of the Fleet, impersonating my great-uncle, Sir Harry Keppel, whom I was said to resemble. My uniform was perfect in every detail, including the sword. But it was hot and smelt nasty, and my white, cotton-wool eyebrows and side-whiskers were gummed on, and were most painful to pull off. Violet was dressed as a Bacchante, and Mamma and Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest were got up as a pair of immense twins, pushed into the room in an enormous double perambulator by Papa, as a very hirsute nurse. I remember an alarming collection of Turks and Chinamen and Eastern houris and Watteau shepherdesses. I felt like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. And, the minute I sat down to dinner (as one Admiral to another), I fell asleep with my head in Lord Charles Beresford's lap.
The journey to Duntreath seemed to take nearly as long as that to Biarritz, but it had compensations. At Carlisle, we were allowed out of the train for ten precious minutes, dogged by my fear that the train might proceed without us. During this time we were allowed a change of magazine, and bottled sweets, at the bookstall. And here too, we took on a luncheon basket. ‘Fee fi fo fum’, we said, as we opened it, taking out mammoth rolls of bread containing sides of chicken. The meal tasted delicious, consisting also of the otherwise forbidden fruits of Cheddar cheese and unripe pears. And there was the fun of putting out the basket at the next station. Later, the inevitable pangs of indigestion were dulled by peppermints from Nannie's bag.
Nina Halliday
There were musical comedies in the London theatres, with lots of gay tunes. My sisters used to go and see them and buy the music and play and sing them for their own pleasure. There was one very special one called The Geisha, and for a while Japanese things were very popular. One shop sold them in Windsor. They had brightly coloured paper fans, and dolls of all sizes in crinkly paper, the small ones with arms and legs just stuck between the paper, and a soft paper body. There were coloured parasols of many sizes and they all had a lovely strange scent which seemed to come both from the wrappings and the clothes. I was given one lovely doll dressed in a green satin kimono, with a wide obi or sash, and a bisque china face, hands and feet, but she must have been made in this country – she had not the right scent. But the very best thing I had was the programme of the play – it was made of crinkly rice paper with a fully coloured picture of a Geisha on the cover, and a red silk cord and tassel, and it too had the same unusual attractive scent.
Joe Garroway
We had a circus every two years, Sanger's or Williamson's circus. They used to come to Consett, which was a busy place then. We would get up at six in the morning to see the elephants and antelopes and camels, it was the sight of a lifetime to see the circus come in. They had to get to Tow Law and put the tent up, and do the ring, and at one o'clock they had to give us a procession. The last procession I can remember had a lion on a steel chain and the keeper sitting beside him. They went up the reservoir and back, then performed at half two and half six. They were only here for one day, yet they had the show to put up, the procession to arrange, two performances, and then to get ready to go to the next place the next day.
Albert Rowells
We used to play a lot of matches on the Moor at Newcastle on a Saturday. We had a brown paper parcel under our arms with our boots and such like, and we used to walk through the Fell, then get a penny car down to the High Level end, and then it was a halfpenny to walk over the bridge. And we used to walk from there onto the Moor. We went back into town and we would go into a café to get a tea, then maybe go to the Pavilion or the Empire or the Hippodrome.
Mr Spark
My uncle, Jack Cameron, knew that I had a sailor doll and nigger minstrel doll – when nigger wasn't a dirty word. The nigger minstrel stayed on the wall but I was allowed to play with the sailor doll. My father taught me how to spell nigger in letters. I wouldn't have been able to write those things but I had them memorised. Uncle Jack said, ‘Spell nigger minstrel.’ I said, ‘N.I.G.G.E.R … nigger minstrel.’ That was association of ideas.
Sometimes we used to get a pig's bladder and blow it up as a ball, and then smuggle that from one lad to another. That's all it was, it wasn't really running with it. We used to smuggle it from one to another and we either had to get it to the top of the schoolyard or the bottom of the schoolyard to score points. I was in my element if I was in the bottom of the scrum wrestling to get that bladder. And it didn't matter how you got it, you could push it up your jersey or put it inside your jacket pocket or under your arm. There was too much tackling, you were underneath a score of boys often, scratching around to get it. I was in my element doing that. That was probably why I went on to take up rugby.
Mr Powton
Each season used to have its game. There'd be marbles, and in springtime when the days were getting longer,
