Maura Corr

While growing up neighbours played a huge part of our life.

We had moved the area the normal miscellany of eccentrics or oddballs.  Mr. F next door kept his wife confined life a prisoner.  He never gave us a hint of a smile.  We always had a huge party on Christmas day.  But Mr. f. got his revenge on us by dying Christmas morning and put a stop to our high jinks.

Poor Peggy, silly, giggling Peggy who never had proper shoes and wore no stocking, spent all her day running back and forth to the local shops.  Her family was one of the poorest in the area.  She constantly plagued her neighbours for cups of this and bits of that.  After constant attack one day the neighbour at near boiling point refused Peggy’s request for a match.  Never daunted Peggy arrived back at the door clutching a newspaper rolled as long as a flagpole “a light from the gas would do” like the torch bearer in the Olympics, Peggy took off.  Nobody ever knew if the flame held out.

Mrs. K of the bad nasal defect had us constantly on the alert.  Her ‘n’assed’ or (asses) often took off on a spree.  We’d help round them up,  We thought we were like cowboys in the films.  Films we saw at least three times a week in our local cinema.  Mostly cowboy films and musicals.  Occasionally films would appear of dubious nature.  We’d slither in with high expectation and slither out again, without a notion as to what it was about.

As I’ve said, sex was never mentioned so presumably these films were about love and sex.  But we were so innocent or ignorant it didn’t register with us.

Then we had the notorious L who lived with her very old granny. Nobody knew who’s child she was of the family.  There were a few others in the family with no parents, only the formidable granny, who dressed in black.

Anyway, L would scale the wall of the local farm wall orchard.  Furtively she’d reappear like a stuffed bear.  Apples up her jumper, down her drawers and adding hip movements which should have assured her a role in any film.  She’d generally distribute the fruit to us who waited nervously outside the farm gates.  In the following years, L firmly established her reputation.  She went to England and eventually married three husbands.

The old granny died, but not before she had half basked a neighbour’s daughter in the mistaken belief it was her wayward grandchild.  Nobody ever sued.

Anyway we who had played in the fields, crossed the clean running stream, picked wild daffodils, primroses and bluebells.  We who had screamed and shouted, scared the rabbits, birds and hares, hardly noticed the rapidly expanding city.  We were young and new horizons beckoned.

The old ways were going and making way for the new.  New roads, new houses and new people.

Now it was getting a job which wasn’t easy.  But whatever job one took we had to stay before we could look for another even if we hated it.  Maybe we could apply for a civil service job.  But one could be denied (a chance) the chance by a few months or your birth cert.  There was a strict limit on one’s age.