Rag man’s horse drama revealed grown-ups’ idiocy

IN a moment of lockdown boredom, My kids asked me what exciting stuff happened when I was a kid?

I’ll tell what happened! The rag man’s horse broke free! I had always liked the rag man. He was one of the few people I saw who was poorer than the people who lived round the doors. I reckoned you had to be desperate collecting the stuff that people who had nowt in the first place had thrown away .

Anyway, it was 1971. I was was six years years old and this bloke’s horse had escaped, and in a pre=digital, pre-Minecraft or Fortnite era, it simply didn’t get any better than that! It rocked my world.

As this now ownerless magnificent beast ran up and down the road outside our house the grown-ups were going radgie – really losing it. Me mam’s shrieking: “Lock the front door, lock the front door!” It was the first time I really realised they could be as stupid as kids. Man, I thought, almost out loud, if the the horse was clever enough to open our front door it wouldn’t have been pulling a cart through this estate in Gateshead – it’d be on the telly, Blue Peter or That’s life.

Meanwhile, me dad’s banging on the window shouting: “Where’s bliddy Steptoe, the lazy auld gyet?” Not familiar with lazy stereotypes, I thought this was the rag man’s real name.

To be fair, nobody really understood him, as he walked around shouting stuff like “hay-en, hay-en”, so God knows what his real name was. In fact, he could have had summit wrong with him – like a medical emergency. Hayen could have been him trying to shout “help me!”.

So me dad’s banging on the window and my heart sank – he was as daft as mam wanting the door locked! Banging on the front window might stop next door’s cat having a poop in the chrysanthemums – but it’s hardly going to stop a radgie rampaging horse .

Me dad’s stereotyping continued – “ye can’t trust them knackers from ower the river yknaa? I’m sure he let it oot on purpose. Givowwer! So after training his nag to go breaking and entering, he then deliberately let’s it loose as part of a bigger plan?

So if dobbin gets lifted by the cops he can shake his peaky blindercapped heed and say “nowt to do with me!” It got better! The horse has done one of those Lone Ranger rearing up on its hind legs.

Me gran runs in from the kitchen and shouts: “Eeh – are the upstairs windows shut?” Upstairs windows? Hells bells – it’s suddenly gone from being a freakin’ four-legged Houdini that can pick locks into Pegasus the mythological winged horse!

It was nearly as exciting as the time Concorde first flew over. I kid you not – people were jumping up and down in their gardens in excitement pointing at the big silver/white bird. But that’s another story – wey, who needed Netflix...