A POLICEMAN.
DO NOT TOUCH IT, EVEN WITH A STICK.
AND DO NOT THROW STONES AT IT.
Pott Brook goes under Hough Lane, and we jumped from the bridge into the field and began to look for caddis fly larvae in the water.
Caddis larvae build tubes from grit and bits of leaf and twig bark to protect their bodies, with only the head and legs poking out. They showed the water was clean. If there were no caddis flies we didn’t pick the cress.
It started to rain.
We walked along the bank to where the cress grew, and John found five tubes. We left the cress to be gathered on the way back and went upstream to look at the guns.
We were nearly across the field when we saw it.
It was on the other side of the brook, floating in a tangle of alder roots. It was grey, with a neck, and a black mark or letters or numbers on the side. We couldn’t read them that far off. But we knew.
What must we do? There was no teacher to tell. It was holidays. It had to be a policeman. The notice said.
We ran back to the station. We looked at the notice again. There it was: on the left, third from the top. Should we tell our mothers first? It said: tell teacher or a policeman. We went in.
The sergeant was sitting at his desk, and he asked what he could do for us. We told him about the cress and the caddis and the thing in the brook, and we took him out and showed him the poster. He said we had sharp eyes, and we went back inside.
The sergeant opened a big book and began to write. Then PC Pessle came in. He was the policeman that saw us across the main road to and from school, and he had given me a broken police watch when I was two because I could tell the time. That’s why my cousins called me Ticker.
The sergeant told PC Pessle what had happened, and asked him to go and check what we’d found. PC Pessle set off with us to investigate. It was raining hard.
We led him over the field at Pott Brook to where the thing was still bobbing in the alder roots. He got down into the water and broke off a dead branch from the tree. We shouted he mustn’t touch it EVEN WITH A STICK. He told us to go back to the bridge and wait.
From the bridge we could see him bending down and poking. Then he climbed onto the bank, holding the grey thing with a neck and a black mark or letters or numbers on the side, just like the poster. John and I ducked below the parapet of the bridge, but PC Pessle told us not to be scared and showed us what he’d got.
It was a grey pot bottle, with words in black on the side:
VITAMIN BEVERAGES LIMITED
BREWED FROM HOPS, GINGER, ROOTS, SUGAR
WHICH ARE GOOD FOR YOU. ASK YOUR DOCTOR.
KEEP COOL.
PC Pessle went back with us to the police station and reported to the sergeant. They both said what good lads we were, and the sergeant wrote in the big book. John and I kept the bottle and we tossed for it. I won.
We were my cousins Betty and Geoffrey, me; Harold, his older brother Gordon, and baby Arthur; Ruth and Mary, sisters; and Iris. Betty and Iris were Big Girls, though Iris couldn’t read. Arthur was there because he was in nappies and Harold had to look after him all the time. We were the Belmont Gang. I lived half a mile away, but my grandma lived at number 11, so I was let in, though I was a strug because I didn’t come from Belmont. A strug was the word my uncle Syd and Harold’s father used for a stray pigeon.
My grandma was old, and had wrinkly brown skin and silver hair and could skip better than the girls. She’d moved from Congleton to live in the village to be near her family because a war was coming, and number 11 was empty because the man living there had hanged himself in the lavatory.
The Belmont Gang, 1939. Back row, left to right: Betty, me, Gordon, Iris. Front row: Mary, Ruth, Geoffrey, Harold with baby Arthur (© the author)
Belmont had been built as four blocks of three houses in Potts’s brickyard field. Each house was two up and two down, with a kitchen, and a garden at the front and a walled yard at the back. Later they had a lavatory added on in the yard. The cistern was in the kitchen to stop the pipe from freezing, and the chain went over a wheel and through the wall. We used to wait until people were sitting down and then pulled the chain to make them shout.
Next to my grandma lived Mr and Mrs Kirkham. They were old, too, but they kept themselves to themselves.
One day, the police had come from Macclesfield and told Mr and Mrs Kirkham they must move out because the house was going to be searched. They went to stay at number 11. This was before my grandma lived there.
The police lifted up the bedroom floorboards and the stone flags downstairs, and took out the built-in cupboards and made holes in the ceilings and tapped the walls and broke through the plaster and the bricks where they heard hollow sounds. And in each place they found money and jewellery and gold and silver. Burglars had lived in the house earlier and had hidden their loot there.
The police put everything back properly and tidied and redecorated the house, but my grandma said Mr and Mrs Kirkham were so upset they were never really happy again.
The allotments for the houses were separate strips, side by side, and my uncle Syd and Harold’s father had their pigeon cotes there. We played on the patch of sand where the privies had been before Belmont was modernized.
When the war came, a brick air-raid shelter with a flat concrete roof was built, and it was dark, and the voices of grown-ups swore at us from inside when we tried to look.
There was an oak tree next to the shelter. We climbed onto the roof by putting our backs against the wall and walking up the trunk of the tree. The roof was our aerodrome, and we used to run round it with our arms out, preparing for take-off, and then have dogfights. Harold was a Messerschmitt 109, or a Focke-Wulf 190, because people said his great-grandfather had been a Gypsy. I was a Spitfire, because I could make the noise of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. This meant Harold was always shot down and had to crash by jumping off the roof. He liked that. But I was too scared, and landed by hanging from the concrete and dropping into the grass.
I kept a hedgehog in a hutch on my grandma’s allotment, and Harold and I gathered slugs to feed it. We picked the big black ones, and sometimes we found orange and grey. We popped the slugs with splinters of glass to make them easier for the hedgehog to eat, and we watched the innards, trying to work out which bits were which. We were both interested in Nature.
We were interested in everything.
I saved up by taking empties back to Mayoh’s off-licence and collecting the tuppence deposit, and I once got into trouble with my mother for carrying the beer bottles in a basket without covering them with paper, because people could see. I bought myself Woodpecker cider with the deposit money, and spent some on carbide which Dobbin Brooks sold at his
