Eric Sykes - If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will

The games were the same as last year, but who remembers, and what does it matter? We children were led one at a time into a darkened kitchen; I was the first to go. I was told to kneel, facing a large white cloth, behind which the light of a torch shone through, and was instructed in a sepulchral voice to put my nose against the light and follow its every movement. My nose never left the light, which I followed slowly up the cloth, and as my head cleared the top a cold, wet sponge was slapped into my face, I yelped, everybody in the kitchen laughed and I joined them. John and Vernon both yelped as I did, and I laughed before the grown-ups because I knew what was going to happen. This was turning out to be a really great Christmas.

Gleaming with excitement at the thought of the next romp, the three of us were in the kitchen, which was now lit by candles. Auntie Emmy started to blindfold me, and so I assumed that I was to be first again for whatever was in store. She led me from the kitchen into the front room, where I was helped to step up on to a plank of wood, and again the sepulchral voice informed me what was to happen: ‘You are going on a flight and you must be very brave.’ Already I was trembling, especially when the board I was standing on began to rise up and up and up, until finally I banged my head and the sepulchral voice went on, ‘You have just hit the ceiling, and now you must jump.’ I was petrified: I couldn’t possibly jump down from where I was at the top of the room. But they urged me on, and eventually I took a deep breath and gave an almighty leap. There was a roar of laughter as Auntie Emmy took off the blindfold and the realisation dawned that I had only really been lifted about six inches. Sheepishly I smiled—it was such a simple mind-over-matter diversion. Auntie Emmy had been kneeling in front while I was blindfolded and as the three-foot plank was being slowly lifted by Dad and Joe Waterhouse, an uncle in waiting until he married Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edna had bumped a book on top of my head, which I took to be the ceiling, and the illusion was complete.

Vernon was next. He wasn’t petrified at all and when Auntie Edna banged the book on top of his head, he just smiled and whipped off his blindfold to loud groans of disappointment—he must have remembered last year’s party. John didn’t have a go as he was already fast asleep, and it was time for us to be taken home, leaving the grown-ups to their own Christmas games.

Grandma Ashton’s seemed to be a meeting place for all our relations. I recall evenings when Dad, Uncle Joe and two other men I cannot bring to mind played cribbage for a ha’penny a point. Before the cards were even shuffled, the curtains had to be drawn and the front door locked, as gambling was illegal—such was our respect for the police, which in this present day sounds overcautious, as the players neither lost nor won more than tuppence an evening.

Northmoor Council School, built before the Boer War, was about half an hour’s walk from across the Mucky Broos up Chadderton Road, past a huge black shiny boulder on the left, which was reputed to be a meteorite from outer space, awesome in itself and, even more frighteningly, said to be bewitched and evil. I never walked by it without crossing my fingers, looking straight ahead, although I watched it out of the corner of my eye in case it did something untoward. That was my daily journey to school, my first small step on the road to education, but after that fatuous fanfare I can recall only very little of my early schooldays.

Question: ‘How old were you when you enrolled?’

Answer: ‘Don’t know.’

Question: ‘What was the name of the headmaster?’

Answer: ‘She was a headmistress.’

Question: ‘What was her name?’

Answer: ‘No idea.’

It would be a very dull interview indeed. I remember the headmistress, a motherly, plumpish lady with white hair, for one unforgettable incident. Every morning, first thing, the whole school assembled for prayers, which culminated with a hymn: the headmistress stepped on to a podium, took up her baton and raised it—this was the only still moment of her performance—and then, crash, bang, wallop, we were off…Arms flailing about, she conducted with gusto in a way reminiscent of a flight controller on board an aircraft carrier guiding a drunken trainee pilot down on to the deck. Not only was it fascinating to watch, but on one particular occasion there was a highlight yet to come. So frenetic was her conducting that there was a flash of colour beneath the hem of her frock and a voluptuous red garter made its appearance, slid down her leg and rested round her ankle. We all waited for the other garter to appear, but we were disappointed. Sadly the garter never appeared again and I assumed she had bought herself a pair of braces. That is my only recollection of the headmistress. In fact I cannot bring to mind other members of the staff, even though they stood behind the headmistress at prayers.

I invariably looked forward to playtime, unless it was raining, when I would have to stand shivering under a sheltered bit of the schoolyard with the others who didn’t possess raincoats. No one except the staff was allowed to remain in school during playtime. Worse still, we could see the teachers staring through the rainspattered windows in order to keep an eye on us, steaming cups of tea in their hands, and biscuits. As we watched enviously there was a sound of thunder, but in fact it was the rumbling of a mass of small stomachs at the sight of the biscuits. When the weather was good playtime would be a blessing—a shrieking, screaming, laughing riot of sound, skipping ropes for the girls and tennis balls kicked all over the place by the lads. One of the more popular games was Jubby. Kneeling, we flipped marbles or glass alleys into a small dent in a corner of the school yard and then we—unfortunately I have forgotten what we did then, but we enjoyed it.

Alongside the ‘Jubby bandits’, another line of kneeling ragamuffins played in pairs a game of Skimmy On. This entailed skimming tab cards alternately at two other cards leaning up against the wall. If you knocked one over, you scooped up all the cards that had missed the target: then another card was placed up against the wall and round two was on. To see these lines of ‘skimmers’ and their intense concentration was like observing Northmoor’s version of one-armed bandits in Las Vegas. Incidentally, those tab cards, better known as cigarette cards, came in most packets of cigarettes. They disappeared about fifty years ago, if not more, and as cigarettes are not politically correct I don’t envisage those wonderful educational cigarette cards coming back, more’s the pity.

Another memory of Northmoor’s is when, after school had ended one day, I dashed out into the pouring rain. It was bucketing down and I was in two minds as to whether to run back into school or swim home. I did neither and, ducking my head, I raced across the street, only to find that the pavement was dry. When I turned round I discovered that the monsoon on the other side of the street was still pelting down. I stared at this phenomenon, a solid wall of rain two yards away. After a short time I rushed off home to relate this extraordinary experience. I expected amazement or at least astonishment, but all I got in reply was a bored, ‘It didn’t rain here.’ That’s all I can remember about Northmoor Council School…funny about the garter, though.

Every Saturday morning Dad sent me up to Grandma Sykes to see if she wanted any errands to be done. This was odd, because he and Mother were reluctant to send me on errands at home. Many years later my father told me that he would never send me out on errands because of my woolly-headedness. I would very likely not remember which shop I was going to, and even if I arrived at the right place I would have forgotten why I was there. Why, then, did Father send me to Grandma Sykes to see if she wanted any errands done? It couldn’t be because he disliked her—after all, she was his mother. Perhaps he just wanted me out of the way for a time. When I arrived at Grandma Sykes I asked her about it, but she just smiled, shook her head and sent me off on an errand, which was no answer at all. It must have been preying on my mind, because I went into the butcher’s and asked for five pounds of King Edwards, and by the time I reached the greengrocer’s I’d forgotten the potatoes and came out with a cabbage. Grandma sighed heavily, took the cabbage from me, donned a shawl over her head and we made our way to the shop together. As we walked, she casually remarked that she and Granddad Sykes together with Aunt Marie, Dad’s younger sister, and Uncle Ernest, Dad’s brother, would soon be moving in with us. This information was of such importance that it banished all the other rubbish from my mind.