Night sounds

The Shepherd Street Mission Children’s Home where I was placed at the age of two years and six months had around 60 people living in it when I first went to sleep in a small room above the entrance door. My room was separated from the rest of the building by a series of passages and storerooms and as only the staff running the home went there it was usually a quiet area during the day.

I remember clearly the sounds of the night from the street below during the summer evenings as my young mind began to distinguish one particular event from another. The only sounds that I could hear clearly came from outside at night: probably not very late at night though as I was such a young chap I would have gone to bed early. Thus my mind was able to concentrate first on the sound, then on what caused that sound.

—That was a bicycle, just the faint whirr of the tyres on the road and an occasional tinkle of the bell.

—Then a car, (although I wonder now who would have had a car to drive down that particular street since those were the days of the Depression); and sometimes there could be at least two or three, sometimes more. The engines had a distinctive note to them, rather a soothing one to me, with a Paah! Paah! of a motor-horn now and then. Those were the mechanical sounds.

—There would follow a time of hardly any noise at all. For quite a time, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I’d hear the low murmur of people talking to each other, accompanied by the sound of their wooden clogs on the pavement. Faintly at first, then gradually increasing as they came nearer, then passing by before growing quiet again. With some, there was an air of business-like urgency in their steps, while others would stop and talk to someone they knew standing at their front door before continuing on or going into a house close by. I’d strain my ears to try and catch what they were saying but I was never able to get both sides of the conversation which I found very frustrating.

—What was that? A hand-bell? Yes!

—And now, the slow rumbling of a hand-barrow wheels blending with that of people. A happy, cheerful sound, sounds I enjoyed the most.

—Then a man’s voice calling: ‘Parched peas! Parched peas! All lovely! Come and get ‘em!’; or the call could be: ‘Get yer baked peraties; baked peraties here’; or maybe even: ‘Hot crumpets! Lovely hot crumpets!' Oh delicious sounds they were to me for people came running and laughing and calling out to each other, all warm and friendly Lancashire sounds, and I’d give a little laugh as I caught their delight. Such simple comforts from cleverly designed little hand-barrows with their individual touches crafted to suit their wares. They were enterprising; the souls who made their way up and down the smoke-grimed streets at night.

They will never know that they gave me such pleasure as a young chap; I lay in my bed and listened to them all going about their lovely Lancashire lives, while I shared it with them in a small measure of a way.

Dennis Crompton © 2013
(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)