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Phil Bell was born in 1949 in the Ancoats district of Manchester.
Johnny Williams, my little fat school pal, had a dad who had a wooden leg, he used to hang it over the door when he went to bed. Mr Williams worked at Smithfield market, he went to work at 3 o'clock in the morning and finished at dinnertime, he would go for a beverage until 2.30 and then home.
A perfect time to see his wooden leg was when we had finished school in the afternoon. To see the leg with straps and a shoe on, hanging over the door was an astounding sight when you are only seven.
His aunt had a pub called the 'Foresters', or 'Anna Bishops' as the locals called it. It was the nearest thing we had to a Wild West saloon. All the tatters and Rag Bone men used to tie their horse and carts up on the croft opposite and go in the pub drinking.
Billy Bishop the son was older than we were, but he still let us pal about with him. We could go upstairs in the pub and play, and when there was a fight we could hang over the balcony to watch.
We called ourselves the 'Mistry Riders'. The Mistry Riders wore raincoats fastened with just the top button, galloping on pretend horses over Queens Road in Manchester from the Playhouse Saturday matinee.
We would burst out of the exit doors from darkness into bright sunlight, some of us had ABC minor's luminous badges holding the coats together, instead of using the buttons.
Saturday afternoons we went over to the other clay hills on Ten Acres Lane. Hunting for newts and frogs. Playing on the 'duck under' near St Edmunds Church, they dumped loads of surplus war trucks and armoured cars there in a scrap yard. It was our real live adventure playground.
We had Barneys Croft, a huge expanse of cinder hills where the old men gambled illegally. It was also part rubbish dump. It was an Aladdin's cave to us kids, I got ringworm from playing on the River Irk, all of us did. I went to the clinic and they gave me blue unction to put on it.
My mother had a pathological fear of some one finding out we were just as poor as everyone else. Nits, bugs, scabies, beetles, blackjacks and cockroaches were reserved for other people. I had nits and we had bugs, my nits came from Sweaty Edwards and the bugs came from next door!
Phil Bell, Greater Manchester, 2001
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