Life and Times Part vii

Yorkshire. Wet, windy and cold. Lots of stone walls. Famous for it's moors, these are stunning but are wet, windy and cold. We moved to a small village south of Rotherham, Laughton en le Morthern (there or thereabouts). Father was obviously moving up in the world because we had the biggest house in the village - Pear Tree Farm. I'm trying to think of bad things to say about this period but amazingly my parents had made a good decision and i have only fond memories of the 3 or so years there.

Mother had a vegetable patch, we had a football pitch (the garden was huge) and dad converted an outbuilding and put a table tennis table in it, i think this was his way of keeping us out of the house. We were welcomed at the local school, played football endlessly and learnt to ride bicycles without stabilisers. Tom had a budgie and i had a chopper, they'd given us our escape route, only now we didn't feel the need to flee. The house had one further plus, i am certain it was the reason dad bought it, it was next door to the local pub. My gambling career started here on Saturday afternoons explaining the intricacies of fruit machines to father. He seemed unaware that the idea was to take out more money than you put in. He never got the hang of it , i did. He further encouraged our gambling by allowing us to double our pocket money by correctly predicting the toss of a coin. Tom correctly did this eight times on the trot one weekend raising his pocket money from 2p to 5.12p - a veritable fortune. Tom decided to keep this windfall to himself, cheers Tom.

One familty tradition started here. Pork pies. We had pork pies for lunch every Saturday for the next 10 years, excepting our period in Germany but that tale is for another time. The pork pie is a large wedge of sausage meat and jelly encased in pastry, sounds disgusting, tastes delicious. We never found ones again that were as tasty as from the local butcher in Laughton. Amazingly aunts and uncles, cousin Ben when he stayed with us in London, frequently came on a Saturday to share in the delights. Dad never bored of it, everyone else did. Maybe these pork pies enhanced brain activity because from this moment my school career took off, but that is tomorrow's story.