Brilliant glow from light of my 1940s Saturdays

IRECALL our 1940s Saturdays always began with an early morning trek down the long steep Bluebell Hill Road to Sneinton Market.

Once there, we kids– and there were five of us hanging on baby Sandra’s pram handle

– had jobs to do en route, picking up all the discarded cabbage leaves and other greens tossed on to the floor of the extensive greengrocery section.

Mam, meanwhile, walked a few yards further on up Hockley to the local butchers asking for bones for our dog! (We didn’t actually own a dog, but he didn’t know that……although in retrospect!)

Our baby was always crying, and as more and more loot was pushed into her pram, the louder she cried. Occasionally one of the stallholders would hastily cut a piece of apple and shove it in her hands and she’d be pacified for a while.

They all seemed to know our mam and kept their unwanted stuff to one side specially for her. We kids didn’t feel any lost sense of pride in doing this – well we knew the delicious things mam could cook up with these cast-offs.

Plus we were allowed to keep and eat any fruit we found.

Once the floors had been denuded of their bounty, we got to wander round after mam and watch fascinated as the pot man lifted a huge basket of pots, threw it high in the air and caught it again. I never knew him even chip a saucer.

There were rag stalls and many’s the time I’ve had a penny dress bought me suitable for an old woman and been wearing it to school on Monday. I can hear mam now saying ‘You’ll grow into it!”.

And I thought I would – when I was about 27!

I’ve gone to Bluebell Hill Junior School many a day wearing a second- or third-hand pair of shoes costing a mere copper or two. Oh what I wouldn’t give to wander around there today, my pockets stuffed with quite a lot of our old coinage of pennies, tanners, bobs, shillings and florins. I’d have a whale of a time, wouldn’t I?

The trek back home was up the notoriously steep Pym Street, piggishly hard to push a pram up.

A few yards and mam would sit down on the wall that bordered and separated two the lower rows of terraced houses, retrieve the tab end from behind her ear, light it and inhale a lung full of blue smoke discharging it dragon-like down her nose, a look of utter contentment I never understood, on her face……till I began to smoke at 14!

Oh, what I wouldn’t give to wander around there today, my pockets stuffed with quite a lot of our old coinage