Coal and milk by horse

Joss Davies recalls when milk and coal came with the clip-clop of hooves

Daylight brought the sound of horses’ hooves when I was a child. At first, they frightened me, but ‘Horsey, horsey don’t you stop’ became my favourite nursery rhyme. I learnt about blinkers and bridles, where milk came from and once, patted the milkman’s horse.

No one in our row of houses drank pasteurised milk (we didn’t have fridges!). Sterilised milk never went sour; it came in long-necked bottles with metal caps. If we needed extra, my mother would stick a scribbled note into the thin neck of an ‘empty’. I didn’t taste pasteurised milk until I went to infant school and had to drink free milk. I hated it as it made me feel sick. When I became milk monitor (handing out the bottles while Sally Skinner stabbed a straw into each foil cap) I gave mine away.

The coalman’s carthorse was slow-moving and genial, with sturdy legs and hairy hooves and stopped at every door. She was too high for me to pat her nose, even had I found the courage. The coalman, looking like Popeye the Sailor, would prise up the manhole cover in front of our terraced house and haul grimy coal sacks onto the chute leading into our cellar, then tip in the coal.

When my father paid the coalman, he took a spade with him. If the horse had done her duty, the coalman would hold an empty sack open for my father to spade in the steamy manure. That

‘The coalman’s carthorse was slow-moving and genial, with sturdy legs and hairy hooves’

went down the chute, too. Now we had smelly coal for the fire and sooty manure for the backyard!

Our cellar smelled of soot, dank coal and ripe manure. In winter evenings, my father would carry the coal bucket down the unlit concrete steps and return with a full load of coal, and, once, a dead rat! When the fire spluttered into life, I used to wonder if some lumps of horse poo were still stuck to the coal.

When I was seven, my father got a promotion. We moved to a semidetached house with a front garden, a gas fire and even a fridge, but we still preferred sterilised milk. Our new milkman drove an electric milk float and wore a white cap and a jacket with the dairy’s name embroidered on the pocket. He persuaded my mother to buy some newfangled sour stuff called ‘yogurt’, which we refused to eat it until she stirred in heaps of sugar!

Life was good now we’d come up in the world, but something was missing. I didn’t miss the dark, smelly cellar and the poo-smelling coal fires – but I really did miss the horses!