I did get some time off and this was spent in the local woods or out in the fields. John and Jeff lived across the road in Bescar brow lane, their Mum was Winnie, one of the ladies that cleaned the Morris Dancers. They had a motor bike which we used to run up and down through the trees of the woods. We would go up the road to Church Garage and Neil the son of the owner would get us a milk bottle or two full of petrol. We would spend many happy hours on the bike up and down pretending to be Geof Duke on the Manx grand prix. Crazy really with no helmets and trees on either side we would go at well over forty miles an hour. We knew how fast we were going because we went faster than the cars on the road along side of the woods and that was a thirty mile an hour limit road. We would skid to a halt on the patch of earth we called the pitch, it was a big clearing where we played football. Then spin the back wheel as we turned around and went down the track towards the stream. John went into the stream once when he misjudged the braking at the other end. We ran down and there he was 10 feet down the bank with the bike on top of him and laughing his head off. Good job the stream was low as when it flooded it was six foot deep. Six inches of water and he was soaked from head to foot. He had sunk in the mud and the bike had not crushed him, he was very lucky, we all were when I think of things that could have happened to us.
About a mile away across the fields was Scarisbrick Hall, it was and still is a boarding school. It is a very historic house and in the woods was an old ice house where in the winter all the ice from the hall lake was taken and stored to chill food in midsummer. It was a pit about 15 feet across and thirty feet deep built of handmade red bricks. The roof was a dome of bricks and any sound you made echoed round the interior. This was abandoned and left derelictso we played in it as kids and thought nothing of lowering a knotted rope down thirty feet in to the darkness. It looked like a great big hump in the woods and at one end was a brick entrance with a steel door, inside it was a walkway around the hole which was about fifteen feet in diameter. There has been iron rungs built into the wall of the hole but they had rusted way. The only way down or up was on a rope and we did this risking all sorts of damage to ourselves, skinned elbows and knees was normal. It’s a wonder that we did not break our necks. We climbed trees and swung from branch to branch like Tarzan. Rope swings would be setup over the stream and rope bridges too so we could play at assault courses. We were never clean.
Very soon after arriving in Scarisbrick I decided to visit my Dads old friends in Burscough. It had been Dave Shuttler that had taken me and Mum to the hospital when I had split my knuckle. I got up one morning and went out to my bike and set off, I went down the canal from the Red Lion because I knew the canal would go through Burscough after all we had been that way with Dad and Mum in Amneris. I arrived at Burscough about forty minutes later and went down Liverpool Road from the Packet house towards Higgins lane. I arrived at the house and parked my bike in the drive and knocked on the door. It seemed to take ages before someone came and answered the door. They were still in pyjamas and I had woken them up it was about seven fifteen in the morning, the family seemed very surprised to see me and asked how I had got there? I told them I had cycled along the canal, they said they would telephone my Dad to let him know where I was. Mrs Shuttler made me a hot drink and some toast and Dad arrived before I had time to finish them. He was really angry with me and I couldn’t understand why. I had just gone off to say hello to old friends now that we had moved back into the area. The bike was loaded into the back of the car and we went back to the pub. “Good job it is Saturday “ he said “and you don’t have to go to school.” I was told never to go off in the future without telling anyone where I was going and never to go off before anyone else was up.
At the back of the Morris Dancers is Fleet Street Farm and it was owned by Dennis Wright. He still did things the old fashioned way and I loved to go and work there in the holidays before I started working in the pub. The wheat and barley were still cut with a binder that tied it into stooks. These were then stacked in the fields and left to dry for a few days before they were taken into the barn and stacked twenty feet high. When all the barn was stacked it was solid with all the grain still on the straw and it would have to be threshed.
One day in September the thresher arrived and it was set up in the farm yard. The tractor was raised on jacks and the wheel was taken off the back, a pulley and belt were put on to drive the thresher. It was a big machine about the size of a double decker bus and the stooks of wheat went in one end and the grain came out from the middle the chaff and the straw came out the other. The straw was baled and stacked while the chaff and the grain were put into separate sacks. The grain was sold to the flour mills and the straw went for animal bedding on the farm. Before the barn was stripped of all the stooks a wire mesh fence was put around it with a gap of about ten feet all around. Inside the fence all the locals put their little dogs like heelers and jack russels. I didn’t realise why until the stack of wheat stooks was only about three feet high, then it started, a rat ran out of the barn and the dogs were on it in a flash. It was grabbed and thrown up in to the air by one of the Jack russels. When it hit the ground it twitched and lay there dead. The other dogs ignored it as it didn’t move, but for the next hour they didn’t stop. They got every mouse and rat that was in the barn, all were dispatched with the same efficiency. At the end of the day two one hundred weight sacks were filled with dead mice and rats from inside the fence and not one had any teeth marks or blood on them. No wonder all the little dogs were called ratters by the locals.
In the Autumn half term holidays I worked picking beetroots and potatoes for Dennis Wright as did all my school mates. It was called screwing beets because you had to screw or twist the leaves off the root when you pulled them out of the ground. We got a shilling for filling a fifty six pound basket and I could fill four baskets in a morning and another four or five in an afternoon. I could make a two or three pounds in a week if I worked hard and that was a lot of money for a young lad like me. I wanted the money to pay for stamps for my collection. Everyone collected something in those days, either coins or stamps was the favourite although I knew some who collected postcards or beermats. In the back of my comics were adverts for different stamp clubs were you could get packets of stamps for a few pence, I joined one of these and the spud picking money was soon taken over to the post office where I bought a postal order and it was sent off for the stamps. I had bought a stamp album from Taylors in Ormskirk and some little sticky hinges to mount the stamps. Some of the sets were fantastic designs, not like the ones we had with just the queens head on. They were from countries all over the world. I wish I knew what happened to them, they got lost over the years.
Next door to the pub lived the Eaton family and next towards Ormskirk was the blacksmiths shop. I was really fascinated when I saw him making horse shoes out of a bar of iron then fitting them onto the horses while they were still warm. It was a place of magic, he made iron gates and all sorts of tools. He could fix a plough that might be cracked or broken tool or could make the smallest pony a set of tiny shoes. Opposite the blacksmiths was the post office and shop. One day a week in the room next to the shop was held a clinic for the new babies of the area. The district nurse would come, set up for all the new mothers and help them. In 1968 the smith passed away and the smithy was sold. A potter bought it and opened a pottery on the site. My mum still has a piece of his work today in her display cabinet, it is a grey coffee mug.
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