All too soon Dad was offered another pub and after thirteen months in The Mersey Forge we were on the move again. On the morning of the move Dad went off to court to change over the license of the pub to the new landlord and Mum supervised the loading of the furniture van. We were all put in the back again and off we went. After thirty minutes the van stopped and the back door was opened. Were we here all ready? NO the driver had stopped at a transport cafe so that they could have their dinner. It was on the Ormskirk road just by the gates to Aintree race course, just an old shed really next door to Smith crisps factory. The dogs , Nessa and Jaque travelled in the back of the van with us. Nessa was a coffee coloured terrier and Jaque was a white toy poodle. We sat in the back with the door open and with nothing to eat because Mum had packed her purse up in a box and it was somewhere in the van. The driver was good enough to buy us a drink and Mum a mug of hot tea.
When we got to the pub, it was the Morris Dancers Hotel in Scarisbrick, not far from Scarisbrick Hall where Dad has taken us on the canal. It was huge compared to the Mersey Forge, it had its own bowling green at the back with two massive elder trees and a little rotating summer house. At the side was a paddock and that joined onto land where there were chickens, at last I was back in the country side and I felt at home.
Dad had had to go to court in Ormskirk before the pub opened so that he could take over the license and the pub could open on time at eleven oclock. The staff had got everything ready even without the boss there. There were two full time barmen, this a real luxury as Dad had to be both land lord and head bar man before. Clif who looked like the man on the labels of Dicky Sam Stout and Danny who’s son Philip was destined to be one of my real mates a secondary school. The pub also had two cleaners, Edna and Winnie, both had boys about my age and I would have doings with them before long. Upstairs the hotel had lots and lots of rooms and the kitchen was large compared to what we knew, there was a morning room, a function room, a living room, large hallway, an office and four bedrooms. Mine and the twins rooms were at the south end of the long corridor next to the office where Dad did all his cashing up and the spirits were stored. Mum and dad's bed room was at the north end of the corridor next to the living room. There was some very large wooden furniture that had been left and could not have been removed even if you had wanted to, it just would not go through any of the doors. I had my own room and it had a fireplace in it as well as a built in wardrobe. The twins had the room opposite and they could see out across the road to the woods. My window overlooked the car park. At the back of the pub was the yard and across the yard was another building it was as big as two houses and contained the garage. The garage also doubled as a bottle store for the pub, it had big sliding doors that opened both ways across the front. To the left of the garage was the coal store, this was the room where all the coal for the pub was stored.
Also in the yard was a small outhouse that was called the wash house. It had an old cooker in it and even had gas piped into it. I could cook on the cooker when ever if I wanted to. The gardener who came to mow the bowling green would come into the wash house and make his own pot of tea as well on the cooker. This was the perfect place for me to keep my pets and \I took it over for rabbits and guinea pigs. I was soon supplying Mr Philips at Ormskirk pet shop again.
Every room in the pub had a coal fire and the cleaners had to clean and light them every day during the winter so we used a lot of coal. It was stored in one of the rooms next to the garage, it was stacked from floor to ceiling and covered half the floor of the room which was about 20 feet square, the ceiling was 8 feet high. Also in the coals store was the bowls for the bowling green, they were stored in racks by the back door which went out on to the bowling green. As you went through the door there were two giant elm trees, they were huge, taller than a three floor house and with trunks six feet across. I could never climb them, the lowest branches were 12 feet high but there were plenty of trees in the woods which surrounded the green that I could climb. I spent many happy hours up these trees watching the men roll the bowls over the smooth mown grass of the green. This was a new thing for me, men would come and have a day at the pub and all they did was roll the bowls on the grass, then go and pick them up and do it all again all day. They would pay Mum to provide them with meals which they would eat in the function room. Dad would give them crates of beer to drink when the pub was closed during the afternoon. On Sunday’s the road at the front of the pub was so busy a policeman would come out of the police station opposite and control the traffic. He would do this for a couple of hours until another police man took over, he would then go down to the summer house and help himself to a bottle of beer that was left there for him by my Dad, he said it was good relations to do this. It meant that when he had some friends stay late after the pub had closed the police would not come round. It was a few years later that traffic light were fitted at the junction.
In the summer traffic would que almost all the way back to Southport when everyone decided to go home at the same time. When there was no people on the green I would try and roll the bowls around. The object was to get as near to the jack, a smaller bowl, as you could with the big bowls. These were weighted on one side and a dimple in the side told you which side was heavier. That was called the bias and I thought it was something to do with the bias binding that Mum used in her sewing. I learnt how to make the bowls bend around corners so that you could miss bowls that were blocking the jack.
No comments:
Post a Comment