MY STREET

There is a weapon which is so deadly, yet so simple. One that can be easily picked up and hidden until used, one that can be devastating when used against adversaries when deployed correctly, yet can be rendered useless with one single blow.

Banned from playing conkers

What am I going on about?  Well, conkers of course. Otherwise known as Aesculus Hippocastanum, which is probably why schoolboys called them conkers. In my street, I was blessed with a multitude of conkers trees which bore every autumn. Literally hundreds of conkers fell to the ground in their bright green spiky shells, and when peeled produced a bright brown shiny nut with a cream eye, through which you drilled a hole and fed a string through it and fastened a knot, and you were ready for battle with other conker owners. The aim was to smash your opponent’s conker to smithereens with one well-aimed blow. I was quite good at this, until one day during combat at school with other schoolboys, my adversary stepped aside at the very last moment, and I broke a window in the rectory. I was banned from playing conkers again.

Stealing elastic from mom’s knickers

However, I had more than one string to my bow. I was quite good at making catapults as well. I could always find the correct Y shaped branch in my road which I could hone into a fine catapult, the propulsion for which was supplied by borrowing elastic from my mother’s knickers, which she only found out about during a rather embarrassing trip to town when someone very kindly mentioned that she had something dangling around her ankles.

Winter in my street was always a challenge. This one particular winter, we were completely snowed in, with a large snowdrift up against our house. I used to enjoy jumping out of my first floor bedroom window into the snowdrift, much to my mother’s annoyance. We really were totally snowed in.

Our house was on top of a hill, and in those days, milk was delivered door to door by electric milk floats. The ice and snow this winter was so bad the milkman used to leave the milk float at the bottom of the hill and rely on the Honesty System for people to come down and take what they needed and leave tokens in the box supplied. This worked well. In those days. Today, the wheels would be stolen, the milk and orange juice stolen and the milk float would have been rolled and set on fire. Times change.

Wellies vs the snow

Because my mother couldn’t get her car out of the garage it fell to me to walk down the hill to the milk float and get what we needed. Sadly, the only shoes I had were Wellington boots, which were great for torrential rain and expeditions in swamps, but not good for walking on frozen pavements. It wasn’t so bad going downhill, slipping and sliding down my street and picking up what we needed, but going uphill was another thing altogether. There was no grip in the boots’ soles at all. Compacted snow from the many people walking down the pavement turned it into an ice rink. Eventually I found a way for going up hill, by actually walking crab-like up the icy pavement, and managed to make slow but sure progress. I finally got home, exhausted, and the first thing my mother said was: “Where is the orange juice?”

I looked out of the window, and saw it was starting to snow again, then I looked at my Wellington boots and thought: “Oh dear.”