THE RESO 

 didn’t realise until someone unkindly pointed it out to me, but the large council estate on which I was brought up was known as ‘The Reservation’.  To those who lived in the posher areas of town, the drives and crescents and boulevards, we were considered ‘the savages from the reservation’.

     The name stuck and slowly we learned to take delight in our notoriety.  We became the Reso and our savage behaviour, or rather our reputation, was feared throughout the town.  Not that the Reso was a particularly fierce place, except at certain times.  But then again I never knew anything different so it seemed natural to me.

     The Reso was a vast council estate carved out of former marshland which backed on to the river.  It resembled a huge Dairylea cheese slice cut out of the western side of the town.  The railway formed the northern boundary and a dilapidated industrial estate made up of corrugated iron buildings painted in that strange green flaky paint, which looks old as soon as it is applied, completed our quarantine.  We seemed safely cut off from the civilised world.

     The practice in those days after the war was to build on a massive scale, hundreds of houses on one site.  The houses quickly filled with soldiers returning from the war and their young families, which tended to expand at an alarming rate in what became known as ‘the baby boom’.

     The houses were substantial and of good quality. Everyone had three bedrooms, one of which was so small it was habitually known as the box room, not that we ever had sufficient boxes to fill it.

     Downstairs, a living room and an equally sized dining room were laid out.  Most of my friends lived in the room designated ‘the dining room’ as it lay between the kitchen and the boiler hidden in the fire-place.  It was by far the warmest room in the house and, in those pre-central heating days, this was a major consideration.

     Despite the pressure on space, I do not know one family who did not use the front room as ‘the best room’.  This meant that it was decked out in the best materials, wood panel linoleum, Remploy furniture and an expensive looking three-piece suite bought on the never-never (except in our house where my mum and dad did not hold with tick!).

     The walls held family pictures telling the world, or whoever was invited in, who we were and where we had come from.  This was echoed on the sideboard where a picture of the family on our one and only foreign holiday dominated.  The only other pictures were of my brother and me in our school uniforms, me with my school captain’s badge on.

     I always felt that if the worse came to the worse, and the police called at our door, these pictures would be used as a silent reference to our character. For that was the point of the front room.  It was not for us, it was for visitors and guests, a place to show, a place to talk seriously on special occasions.

     The garden was an undoubted asset to the house.  The passion of the time was to plant privet hedges to soften the menace of the ring wire fence which marked off all the borders.  The square front garden had a substantial breeze block wall some two feet tall and the gateposts were made of a two foot square pillar of bricks capped with crenulations to resemble some castle gatehouse.

     Our gate was always open, which rather spoilt the defensive effect.  The wall was the scene of medieval carnage though, as we played bestest falls, which meant that we pretended to walk along the wall, oblivious to the hidden archer in the privet who would pretend to shoot us.  We, in turn, would pretend to be shot and fall spectacularly from the wall to the grass below.  Whoever made the most spectacular death dive got to be the archer and the process was repeated until we got bored or someone fractured a wrist in an attempt to outdo the others.

     In the dry soil that abutted the house, my dad had planted some bulbs that appeared like fireworks every summer.

     There was a front porch fringed by a semi circle of bricks and, unlike most of the houses on the estate, which were bare brick, ours was coated in flaky whitewash.  I was always intrigued that in the mortar of the wall that supported our full length back gate were some airgun pellets.  I wished I had an airgun and I dreamt of the marksman who had many years before left his mark in the drying mortar. Apart from the marksman, I was the only other person who knew about the pellets and it was a secret I enjoyed.

     The tall gate meant that the alleyway at the side of the house was always dark, damp and windy.  It always gave me a bad feeling, unlike the moss which congregated around the large iron manhole cover that we used to step on to hear its metallic thud.  At the end of the alley, to the left, was the kitchen door, painted corporation light blue.  Ahead was the space for the bin and behind that the substantial shed and outhouses.  There was a toilet which we only used in emergencies, a coal hole which was replenished with a hundredweight of coal every week in the winter, and the shed itself which doubled as an aircraft cockpit, the wheelhouse of an ocean liner and a convenient place to mope when in trouble.

     Behind the shed, under the rusted, metal-framed, windows was a dumping ground for garden waste and an old bike, and from here I could climb onto the fence post and then lever myself up onto the thick, concrete shed roof.  This was a fair vantage point, because as ours was a corner plot, I could see in two directions, the gardens of a fair selection of my best friends.  On bonfire night, as dusk fell, I always ended up here, from where I could observe the first of the rockets erupting, and smell the tang of freshly lit fires.

     In the winter of 1963 the snow fell so deeply and the wind blew so strongly that a magical drift appeared which reached up the eight feet to the top of our shed and I longed to have the courage to step off the shed roof into the inviting snow and ice.

     My dad had masterminded the design of the back garden.  He could be very deceptive in such enterprises.  Without fuss, he could turn his hand to most things and I was surprised to come home from school one day to find the garden, which had previously been rough ground, over which my mother would only venture in her garden boots to put out the washing, staked out with string and wooden markers to a grand design of some magnitude.

     From the shed to the end of the garden near the rabbit hutch, the outline of a path appeared.  This continued along the fence at the end of our plot.  Wooden battens had been used to delineate the path and my dad was busy breaking up council paving stones to use as hard core foundation.  It was one of the best times to help him and be deemed useful on such a major engineering project.

     To smash things in a constructive manner and mix the sand, cement and chippings so purposefully was incredibly fulfilling.  When we finished, we both stood back, as workmen do, and surveyed our work. We declared ourselves satisfied with our labour.  I was proud to be included in the ‘How do you think we’ve done?’ and I was sorry when the project was finally over.

     The downside of this building work was that the mud pathway along which I had taught myself to ride a bicycle by holding on to the clothes line with one hand whilst steering the bike with the other, was obliterated.  No bad thing really, as I had managed to pull half a washing line down on one effort.  That had been a very bad day. 

     The substantial rabbit hutch, another of my dad’s projects, housed Snowie and a series of ill-fated companions.  Amongst them were Blackie the intrepid black rabbit who attempted to head butt his way through the chicken wire, and Stripey the grey and black rabbit, who exploded with diarrhoea.  On reflection we were not particularly original in our rabbit naming.

     Snowie, though, did seem a permanent fixture in my formative years, predictably nibbling on some vegetable matter and producing copious amounts of small black excrement, which I once convinced my young and hungry neighbour were actually currants.

     This was the safe bit of my life, and I knew every inch of it.  Outside our house you moved with some caution.  There was a lot to think about as you moved about the estate, who to offend and who not to, when to gamble and when to keep quiet.

     Mums on the estate were usually pretty accommodating, unless they went out to work, in which case they were invariably very harassed.  My mum did not hold with mothers going out to work whilst little ones were of school age and said so on a regular basis until she too went off to work when we hit a period of cash embarrassment.

     Dads were a different matter.  Most of the dads on the estate worked shift work in the factories down the coast.  The pattern of changing shifts from mornings, days and nights completely destroyed their sleep pattern and left them tired and irritable.  The downside for us was that no matter what hour of the day we chose to play around the houses, there were a number of dads trying to snatch a few hours sleep at the same time.  This was bad chemistry. Never more so, than when the dad in case of point was Sammy Barker. 

     Sammy was a wiry man with highly serviceable trousers held up by a thick leather belt, black army style working boots, an iron-singed shirt, a florid face and thick metal rimmed glasses.  He had a large number of children, estimates vary, but collectively they were known as the Barkers in the same way you might refer to a disease as scurvy or rickets – a nasty bout of the Barkers.  Even by the low standards of our estate they were notoriously combative and easy to provoke.  In the normal scheme of things you would wish to avoid them, but Sammy was fatally attractive to me.

     The reason for this being that he was frequently full of ale, and, on his circuitous journey home, when he drifted down our avenue, stopping only to engage in an animated conversation with the pillar box, alternatively agreeing with the pillar box and then falling out violently with it and cursing its parents and its redness, he would focus on me.

     In many respects what followed had much in common with cobra baiting.  I tried to sway backwards and forwards in time to Sammy’s meanderings.  ‘All right Mr Barker?’ I’d venture as politely as possible.

     ‘All right lads!’ he’d reply, which was strange when there was only me there.  If I was lucky he would go on to a kind hearted ramble along the lines of …

     ‘ You‘re a good lad you are. I like you lad, you’re always very polite. I know your Dad I do. Here son, get yourself and all your mates some sweets.’

     At which point the contents of his pockets would be proffered.  Invariably this would include sweet wrappers, betting slips and the inevitable dirty linen hankie but also assorted loose change and occasionally a ten shilling note.

     He’d shamble on and I’d pick the assembly of money from the floor and treat myself to some chewy sweets and the latest ice lolly sensation.  However such occasions were outnumbered at least four to one by a different interchange when Sammy would turn ballistic at any mention of his name.

     ‘I know you - you cheeky little sod.  Come here and I’ll take my belt to all of you!’

At which point I’d leg it and Sammy would be left talking to the post-box,

      ‘I know his Dad, you know. I do.’  And the post box would stand in silent agreement.

     The thing was, you never knew which Sammy you were going to get from one occasion to the next, and he would not remember you from one meeting to the next, which made it both potentially dangerous and potentially profitable – but apparently he did know everyone’s Dad.