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| The Coalman |
When I was a young boy we didn't have central heating in our old Victorian school house. In wintertime, there'd often be ice on the inside of our single-glazed upstairs windows and the linoleum on the floor felt freezing cold to my naked feet when I leapt out of bed on a January morning.
Dad made the fire downstairs at the crack of dawn. I would usually wake to the sound of him raking out the fireplace below. The coal was delivered to our coal house every fortnight by Tony Chappell whose yard was situated between our East Yorkshire village and the next one - Brandesburton.
The coal was shovelled from his old lorry into thick black hemp sacks which Mr Chappell carried on his right shoulder with ease. His face and arms were always blackened with coal dust when he called round.
Back then very few villagers had their own cars. This meant that there was money to be made from door-to-door deliveries. Of course we had bottled milk delivered to our doorstep every morning but there was also a pop man who brought various varieties of fizzy drink on his lorry. You got money off if you returned bottles from the previous week. My favourite flavours were dandelion and burdock and sarsaparilla. There was no Coca Cola.
There was a butcher's van and every Friday a fish man opened the rear doors of his Morris van to reveal cod, a set of weighing scales, herring, prawns and our mother's favourite - finny haddock which she boiled in milk with a knob of butter. It was our staple meal on Friday evenings - with mashed potato and peas.
Sometimes a troupe of gipsies would pass through the village like visitors from another planet. We marvelled at their rags and exotic appearances. They had no motorised vehicles just unkempt horses to pull their covered wagons. In summertime, some of their sunbrowned and unwashed children would be barefoot.
The gipsies didn't talk to us and we didn't talk to them. We just observed each other with curiosity but sometimes single gipsy folk would call at our house selling clothes pegs and suchlike and there'd be occasional tramps too - men of the road with boots falling apart. They looked like scarecrows. I remember that Mum was always very kind to the gipsies and the tramps too. She'd buy the clothes pegs and the wildflower posies and she'd give those ragged men mugs of tea and ginger biscuits and chat pleasantly to them before they carried on walking their roads to nowhere.
Nowadays you don't see tramps in the countryside any more and the gipsies of yore have Toyota trucks and long white caravans with calor gas canisters outside. But they are still objects of fear and curiosity to those of us who choose to live in houses. I believe that the gipsies - now often referred to as"travellers" - call the rest of us "gorgers" because we over-consume. I think they might be right about that.
The house I spent most of my childhood and youth in (from age 5 to 18) had single-glazed windows, too; their wooden frames did not shut very tightly so that cold and wind could get through easily. Also, the panes rattled in the frames every time a lorry or the bus went past our house. Watching TV was sometimes a challenge! It was a very cheaply rented terraced house, though, so my parents did not invest any money in improvements, and the landlord didn't think it necessary.
ReplyDeleteWe had oil central heating (later switched to gas, as per regulations for cleaner air coming into place in the mid-80s, I think), but until the day we moved out there in July 1988, the bathroom had a coal and wood burning boiler for hot water. Every time we wanted a shower (so, every day really), wood had to be brought up from the cellar and a fire made. It gave the most cosy warmth I remember; much nicer than any central heating I have experienced since. Cleaning out the ash drawer with a metal bucket was always tricky; you did not want the ash to be blown about, so all windows and doors had to be shut until you were finished.
I can not remember how often we had coal delivered; I guess it was only a couple of times a year, as there was a huge heap of coal in one corner of the cellar which had stamped earth as its floor. There were always spiders about the wood pile, which made my sister and I argue every time whose turn it was to fetch wood - was it the person who wanted a shower, or the person who'd just had a shower and used up all the hot water?
As for "gorgers", it is hard to tell whether you were serious there. The term in Romanichal is actually gadjo (often pronounced like "godja", which does indeed sound like "gorger"), used for anyone who is not Romani, either by ethnics or lifestyle (a Romani by birth can also be a gadjo if he or she chooses to live permanently in a house).
Whoops, that became much longer than I meant to - sorry!
DeleteWell. I am pleased that my post drew memories from your own well Meike. Thank you for the language point. I was being serious about "gorgers" as I had come across that term and that explanation in an autobiography by a modern day gipsy. Perhaps he didn't know the origin of the word either.
DeleteNot many gipsies still speak "proper" Romanichal; it has never had much of a written history but most things were (and still are) passed orally. Nowadays, more gypsies and travellers speak the language of the country they live in and gradually, their old across-border language with its various dialects is getting lost.
DeleteLovely nostalgic post, Mr. P.!
ReplyDeleteI, too, remember the milk deliveries but have always had some sort of heat which did not involve coal or wood except for the few years I lived in a beautiful little old Florida cracker house that my then-husband and I had moved to some land we owned. He and a friend restored it and I loved that house. We heated with a woodstove and I was usually the one to get it started in the mornings. It was cozy enough.
As with The Librarian above, I am pleased that my post also brought up a pleasant memory for you Ms Moon. Thanks for dropping by.
DeleteIf you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Gypsy Boy" by Mikey Walsh, who grew up with the travellers in England. It's an illuminating book. I don't remember hearing the term "gorgers" but it IS kind of accurate, sadly.
ReplyDeleteThanks Steve. I have read that book.
DeleteMany shared memories there YP...we had coal delivered but never had the pop man deliver..way too fancy!
ReplyDeleteI suppose that when you wanted a drink you had to wait for puddles to form in the street.
DeleteWe share the same memories YP. Our milkman also sold bread and little bottles of orange juice. And how I wanted a goldfish from the rag and bone man...never got one though. My early years were spent in a very poor area of Preston but the people were worth their weight in gold.
ReplyDeleteThey must have been very skinny then Lorraine!
DeleteWhen I was a child, we didn't have a man delivering coal to homes, but the iceman did cometh!
ReplyDeleteWe had an ice chest aka ice box...and the ice-man delivered the ice to our door. In the early 50s bread and buns were delivered to the homes by a horse-drawn cart. Poor old horse...he had to go up and down the many hills of Gympie.
A truck selling fruit used to also do home calls, as did one from one of the local food shops. Milk, in bottles, was also delivered to our door...doorstep.
Life was simpler in so many aspects.
Just the other day, a very nice fellow who works at the local supermarket here where I live and I were discussing the million varieties of soap powders sitting on the shelves. The different varieties...the number available is ridiculous! It's all hype! I buy the cheapest, plain-label, performs its chore as good as the ones that cost three or four times its cost...it just doesn't have a fancy outer and a plethora of unnecessary descriptive words!
You are right Lee. There is far too much choice in our supermarkets. All that choice comes at a terrible price in terms of production, marketing and transport. It all impacts upon our beautiful planet.
DeleteLovely memories you have of your childhood. I bet there's a book or two (or more) in those memories...
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind encouragement Bonnie.
DeleteWe didn't have central heating and had a very cold old house that had not been insulated. we had nothing delivered to the farm. Dad had to haul the coal.
ReplyDeleteYou have brought back many memories of childhood. We had the butcher, the fish man, the bread man all calling at least once a week. The fizzy pop lorry was " Corona" and I think we had 2 bottles per week. The coal company was A.J.Betts and Mum used to go to their office near the railway to order and pay for the coal. Oddly enough, I was reminded about the name A.J. Betts recently. We also had a man come into the house every week, and Mum would order groceries that would be delivered the next week. He was called Tom Major. How weird that I can remember these names but struggle with names recently learnt!! Heating was a coal fire in the living room....your knees would be warm, but a cold draught under the door made the rest of you chilly. An electric fire in the bedroom to quickly get undressed in front of in the winter. Beautiful ice patterns on the inside of the windows in the morning.
ReplyDeleteNo central heating in our home either, just a coal fire downstairs, and dad used to light a paraffin lamp in the toilet down the yard.
ReplyDeleteDespite having central heating now, I still am not comfortable with an overly warm house, especially at bedtime.
We used to have gypsies that came peddling their wares, if you refused to buy, they would cast a curse on your household, and once I remember them stealing my mum's purse, after she had given them a cup of tea and a custard tart !
Jo