A Fifties Christmas calamity!

Roy Hampson recalls the day a goose ran amok in the family home…

When I was eight, Dad won a goose for our Christmas dinner in a pub raffle. Only thing was, it was alive! He carried it home under his arm, the bird protesting badly, and he had no option but to let it loose once he entered the back door. It chased Mam around the kitchen… I froze, watching Dad enticing this poor frightened bird into the pantry. The creature went beserk, sending pots and pans and zinc buckets flying. Mam threw a wet tea towel at Dad in protest, after seeing what a mess the bird had made by knocking the whitewash off the pantry wall...

I grew up in West Yorkshire in the Fifties and to be honest I found most Christmases rather lonely. Mam and Dad were private people and did not welcome friends or relatives calling round. Mam did have a friend called Maude who I would dread calling on, she smelt terrible!

‘We would sit in the cheap seats and Dad would joke about the possibility of rats’

I had a sister 15 years older than myself but she had left home and was married to Herbert. I would look forward to the annual ritual of my sister Jean calling round to help Mum bake the Christmas cake, especially when the chance came to lick the mixing bowl clean afterwards. The baking of the cake took place in our big black cast-iron oven, part of the living room coal fireplace.

Mam would sit in front of the coal fire on cold winter evenings, watching the coals glow red and the flames dance to and fro, occasionally poking the fire. She was superstitious, and if a small black flake of soot appeared on the iron bars at the front of the fire, she would remark ‘that’s a stranger on the bar’, a warning sign that a stranger will knock on our door. ‘If only that would happen,’ I wished, ‘no one ever calls here at Christmas’.

I had playmates, but at Christmas they were content to stay at home watching their parents’ newly acquired television sets. My friend David did once join me for doorto-door carol singing, but we got so bored of We Three Kings and Good King Wenceslas we decided to sing Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, a song from our favourite movie of the day. We sang the song loud and enthusiastically, until a woman opened her front door and threw a pan of cold water at us both.

A favourite Christmas present back then was a ‘Bayko’ model construction set, which consisted of Bakelite bricks, windows and doors. This kept me occupied for hours creating model houses of my own design.

On Boxing Day, Dad would take me to the pantomime at the local Theatre Royal, a rundown shabby building that stood on the edge of town. We would sit in the cheap seats high in the upper circle and dad would always joke about the possibility of rats running beneath our feet! One memorable moment was when a huge curtain suddenly fell down onto a group of dancing girls on stage, creating a large cloud of dust and loud screams. Appropriately enough considering what had been running around our kitchen, the panto was Mother Goose!

As for our goose – neither Mam nor Dad had the heart to harm it – Dad gave it to a local coal miner to live out its days on his allotment!

Above left: Roy aged eight Above right: A poster of the Theatre Royal Panto from around 1955 Far left: Mam and Roy’s big sister Jean. Right: Dad at his job at the local glass bottle works