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I was born in the year 1933 in a stone house in the Dales of County Durham near the Burnhope reservoir, wrote Jim Dowson. The family moved to Crook in County Durham a few years later and that was where I did my growing up.
Like most kids at that time I was used to doing without, there wasn't much work in the area, mostly coal mining and what there was didn't bring in much money. But like other families we got by and helped each other whenever we could.
Being the youngest of seven I was usually picked to do the less desirable jobs and of course not being of working age yet seemed to clinch it. Seeing that coal was the only form of heat and hot water in those days it became a precious commodity and no matter how we scrimped and saved the coal house was always empty when the coalman came with our weekly ration of coal.
We usually were able to get by okay in the summertime but in the cold and dreary winters it was never enough. I can't remember why we would run out of coal but it happened quite regularly. It could be that we were rationed and could only get a certain amount or it could be that we couldn't afford to buy more.
I only knew that if we ran out then I was the one who would have to go bucket in hand knocking at a neighbour's door to ask if my mam could borrow a bucket of coals until the coalman came. I can't ever remember paying back any of those borrowed bucket's of coals but knowing the kind of people who lived around us they wouldn't have taken them anyway.
I used to try to make money to go to one of the 3 local picture houses, it used to cost us a penny in those days to go to the matinee and watch such oldies as Buck Jones and Hopalong Cassidy.
I would ride my old boneshaker of a bike to the local sawmill once a week to get a burlap sack of the waste wood. They used to have a big wooden bin filled with the waste wood that was to be burned in a big outside furnace.
I would pick out the best I could find and fill my bag and then stuff the bag through the frame of my bike and push it home, but when it was downhill I'd hop astride, riding with my feet up on top of the sack of wood.
My sister and I would sit on the concrete floor in the scullery and chop up the wood into sticks, and then make bundles by tying a string into a loop and putting the sticks inside it. My favourite part of the whole job was trying to tap the last one or two sticks into the bundle to make it super tight.
I would load the bundles of kindling into a little 4 wheeled cart I had and we would then go knocking on the neighbours' doors to try to sell them for a penny a bundle. We had our regular customers and never had any trouble getting rid of them all.
Of course, collecting old pop bottles was always good for a few coppers but I have to admit at one time me and my mates weren't exactly too honest with the little shop at the bottom of our street. We actually returned the same bottles more than once having shimmied over the back wall where he kept the empties and liberated a few of the empty bottles he had stored there.
As I would walk home from school I always kept an eye out for the piles of coal that the coalman deposited in the back street outside the coalhouse door. I would walk up the back street to my house at the top and if there were any piles of coal in the street I would knock on the door and ask if they would like me to shovel in the coals for them.
I usually managed to get a tanner (sixpence) for doing that but it was hard work for me to have to throw the coals up into the small door built into the brick wall. Needless to say I was pretty filthy and tired by the time I was through but getting the tanner and sometimes a bucket of coals was worth it.
Jim Dowson, California USA, 2001
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