MY ALADDIN’S CAVE

FURTHER to the nostalgic correspondence in H&H, the farrier is due this week so while baking some cake for him, my mind went back 65 years to when I was a little girl taking my pony to be shod. The blacksmith’s workplace was an Aladdin’s cave for me. Clutching a pound note for the set of shoes, I would study posters showing donkey and ox hooves, shoes for founder and special feather-edged ones for brushing or treating splints.

In the forge, the apprentice would be working the bellows or sweeping up. And the blacksmith, who’d been a Desert Rat, would teach me some Arabic words that I still have today. But one incident sticks in my mind. When a bell rang, a chap stood up and started fighting the air – he’d been a boxer and this was something called “punch drunk”, which happened as a result of too many fights.

They were good old days, but perhaps not for everyone.

Erica V Norman

North Somercotes, Lincs