About 1926 or 7, Radio was appearing in some homes. The first sets were called ‘Crystal sets’ and must have been very simple because lots of young men were making them. A cousin of Dad’s, Billy Davis, from Smallwood, made one for us. All I can remember of it is a small wooden box and an aerial attached to a ten foot pole in the garden. The wire was brought in through the window frame and thence to the box. The person ‘listening in’ wore a pair of headphones and held in the hand a very fine wire with which to ‘prod’ the crystal. If you were lucky, you heard something! I can remember coming in from school and saying “You don’t want to listen in tonight do you?” because I knew that I would have to be absolutely quiet. Dad would have the headphones on and poke about with the wire, saying, at fairly long intervals, “Hush love, just a minute, I heard something then, it’s music, it’s only faint but is music!” then Mum would put the headphones on and try and hear the music, but she soon got impatient and fed up with poking about on the crystal trying to find the elusive sound.
Dad was very fond of music and had a mouth organ which he could play quite well, at least, I thought so but Mum didn’t like him playing it. We then had a piano from ‘Sherwins’ in Hanley, Mum was so proud of it and I was sent to have lessons from Olga Davies. She was supposed to be the best teacher in the village, no doubt she was good, but I was terrified of her and dreaded going to my lessons. She had a loud voice and was very impatient and it is a wonder that I ever learned anything, but eventually I was able to play sufficiently well for mum and dad to think that it had been money well spent. Dad used to play by ear and, no doubt, would have been quite good if he had had lessons.
When I was about seven I caught measles and had to stay in bed for a week. People were kept in bed for even trivial illnesses then, although , of course, measles was fairly serious. As it was spring, Mum had started spring cleaning – this was a mammoth operation with no mechanical aids. She had been clearing out the cupboard on the landing and, among other things to be thrown out, was an old trilby hat of dads. It must have been pretty shabby as they did not throw things away lightly. She thought that she had taken it downstairs to throw in the dustbin, and, coming in from the garden, she saw the hat on a chair in the kitchen. Saying to herself “I was sure I had thrown that away”, she nipped out to the dustbin and threw it in. when she got back to the house she heard voices upstairs and realised, to her horror, that while she had been in the garden, the Doctor had come to see how I was progressing, and, after leaving his hat on the kitchen chair, had gone upstairs to see me. She had to rush back to the bin, dust off the hat and put it back on the chair! I am sure that Billy Lynd (as he was affectionately known) would have laughed if he had known. He was an Irishman with a beautiful soft brogue and a very quiet manner, he went on all his rounds on a bicycle, or on foot, and only bought a car in the late thirties. He was the real old fashioned family doctor, a friend to everyone.
Those days, Shady Grove carried on past the junction with Wesley Avenue as just a cart track for a few hundred yards, past Sam and Ashley Mitchell’s houses, then it divided, the track on the right went to Shipley’s farm and, on the left, crossed Colclough’s fields to the wood and the brook. This was always called the ‘Water Brook’, how could there be any other kind? The wood was paradise, every Saturday morning, and in the school holidays, a crowd of us, armed with a packet of jam butties, a piece of ‘filling’ cake and a bottle of water each would disappear for the day. The ground in the wood was light brown in colour and springy from the layers of pine needles and dead bracken. The new bracken was unfurling its pale green fronds everywhere, and would soon be high enough to hide in, for this was May and everywhere was drenched with the scent of bluebells. It makes me very sad to think that my grandchildren may never experience the beauty and perfume of a bluebell wood. The flowers were like pools of deep blue water, and although I must admit we picked some to take home, we did it carefully, not breaking off the leaves or disturbing the bulbs, not because we were ‘goody goodys’ but just because it was common sense to us, as country children, we knew that then they would be there again the next year. Even the stems of the bluebells were beautiful, palest green and pure white where they had been in the ground, they gleamed like spun glass. There were hundreds of birds in the wood and the air was filled with their songs, and, in the background, always the Cuckoo. Just at the edge of the wood was the field where the brook ran. The path crossed by a little wooden bridge. The water was clean and sparkling, only a few inches deep, you could see the ripples of sand at the bottom. There were Larks and Lapwings in the field, and clumps of Lady’s smocks and Cowslips, and, in the marshy areas, Kingcups and Marsh Marigolds. We used to lie and watch the Larks, singing as they soared in what always seemed to be a straight line, up, up into the blue until they became a tiny speck, and when we could no longer see them we could still hear their song, long after they had disappeared from view. The Lapwings (we called them ‘Peewits, their cry sounds like that) were quite a large colony, they whirled and circled the field, and then suddenly one would drop like a stone, and we knew it was taking something to its nest, this was never where the bird dropped, it would run several yards through the grass to its young.
We played in the wood and fields in winter too, especially after a heavy snowfall. Someone had a sledge and we used to race through the woods in wellies and warm coats, our breath billowing out in clouds through the frosty air. At the far end of the field was a small hill, just right for sliding down. We did play street games too. Hop scotch, skipping, whip and top, and bowlers, this last was a hoop made from wood or iron which you smacked with a stick while running along, the idea being to keep it going and not let it fall. There was a season for all these games, for a few weeks everyone would be skipping, then suddenly, it was whip and top time, or hopscotch. No one seemed to know who decided when it was time to change, but once decided, all conformed, and you would not see anyone skipping if it was whip and top time!