PT 2

Paddy was our milkman.  He was a character – all those people were characters then.  He was probably 60-ish, but even people my age now looked old to a child back then.  He had combed-back hair – Brylcreemed.  Nearly all men of his era did.  Straight from the 1940s.  Probably fought in the war.

Paddy drove a Cyclops electric float.  It had one eye in the middle – a big headlight.  It ran on three wheels, with one at the front – everything went to a point over that front wheel.  Paddy had a look of his milk-float, in the way people look like their dogs, and wore a long white coat or smock.  He lived in a bungalow a few streets away from us – next-door to my auntie and uncle.  He heard all their rows, but kept himself to himself.

I’m a bit hazy about what age I started helping Paddy and how many days a week I did it.  He used to pick me up as he delivered to our house and we’d head off together around all the suburban streets behind ours to finish up by the shops, where I got my reward – a third of a pint of orange juice.

I was just so happy with Paddy, on his float, delivering milk.  I could probably only manage one bottle at a time, clutched to my chest, but Paddy didn’t mind.  You took your time and got the job done.

We didn’t suffer too much from things like efficiency or choice in those days.  A milkman’s life was fairly straightforward.  They delivered silver-top pasteurised or steri, with the crown-cork.  Green-top was unpasteurised raw milk. The old dears liked the steri and the green-top, but almost everyone else got silver-top.

The writing was soon on the wall for my days on the milk.  I was taken the couple of miles to the local clinic for a series of vaccinations, including polio on a sugar-cube.  Sweet.  The clinic was in a gorgeous old building from the 1920s, had a thatched roof and was set in grounds.  Goodness knows what it had been before.  This was a time before meanness took hold.

Leaving the clinic, I was so proud I hadn’t cried and was showing the puncture site to my mam, when my eyebrow sustained a glancing blow from a passing lamp-post.  The lamp-post was unharmed and was green, cast in iron, with decorative scrolling at about eyebrow height for an average four year-old. 

I was led back into the clinic wailing.  I don’t know where my phobia for stitches originated from, but it manifested itself that afternoon.  “Not stitches!  Please not stitches!” I screeched, presumably to the bemusement of the nurses.

In these days of safety-consciousness, the footpath from that clinic would probably be closed-off as a hazard.  Shortly after my collision, a neighbour’s boy raced into a garden behind a high privet hedge to retrieve his football.  There followed a commotion of sorts – the exact details are unclear to me over the passage of years – but a lady emerged looking shocked with the bedraggled minor in tow.  The ball had settled into a shallow pool of water, which sank beneath the lad when he stepped into it.  It was the cover of a swimming pool, anchored only by bricks on its edge.  Swimming pool?  Within two miles of our estate?  Live and learn.

A new word had crept into the lexicon.  I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to it, as it didn’t seem relevant to me.  I remember talk of the thing having being built the previous year and apparently some of the older kids went there.  The morning arrived when I was to find out what the word meant.  My mam took me out of the front door dressed in a smart little pullover and little checked shorts, with new socks pulled up to my knees. 

The timing couldn’t have been worse.  Paddy arrived in his Cyclops milk-float.  “Paddy!” I screamed.  I tugged and pulled to be let loose.  No good.  I writhed and pulled and dug my heels in.  “Paddy!” 

“I want to go with Paddy!”

My mam has never taken embarrassment well.  I seem to thrive on it.  Poor Paddy was probably upset by the whole thing.  I’m sure he tried to reason with me – promised me a ride at the weekend.  It didn’t work.  I screeched and howled.

Luckily for my mam, a lady came by on her way to teach at the school – Mrs. Steele.  As a highly-trained professional, she knew what to do and I was soon placed in her care – led away sobbing and defeated.  I expect Paddy sat and lit himself a cigarette.  My mam would have disappeared in through the front door and made a cup of Rington’s tea in the kitchen, mortified by the scene.  She probably spotted a neighbour or two peering from their upstairs window.  Shame she never got to take me to my first day at school.