Jim Radley's Story
To get home from school quickly, we’d have hoops! We had little money, so you made hoops of what was thrown about and Father would cut the spokes out of the rim of a bicycle wheel. You’d run a stick inside the wheel to guide it, and you’d get home in ten minutes from Kelling easily, or you’d lose the thing going down the hill!
It’s so different today. We’re too careful because the situation has developed whereby we’ve got to be, but years ago you never thought about locking a door, it would seem very foreign to have done so, and if you went anywhere to catch a bus, you’d bike in and leave your bike lying in the hedge and that’d be there when you came back. Salthouse was a lovely place to live you know, it was so free and easy. Nobody cared where you went; you roamed the fields and the marshes. In summer time we’d be running rabbits in the harvest field. It would be nothing to get twenty or thirty rabbits out of a field, and you can imagine how many more must have got away.
The heath would be closed in summer: nobody was allowed on there with a dog from 1st April to 1st September.
In those days when things were so poor there were a lot of tramps about, and if a tramp called at a house he was always given something—you don’t know do you, you could be in the same position, couldn’t you! Billy West who lived in Cross Street, I remember him telling a tale about Harry Fitt who came from Kelling. He walked to the North Country for work—where in the North Country I don’t know—but he walked there; and he walked home again because there was no work (as there was nowhere you see). He tramped on the way home and begged for food where he could. He said this particular day he knocked on a door (of course it wasn’t allowed to beg, that was against the law) and when the man opened the door Harry could see a policeman’s helmet hanging on the wall in the passage. So he said—quickly thinking—“Does Jimmy Smith the well-sinker live here?” So the chap said “Just wait a minute and I’ll go and see if I can find him”, and he went in and came back with a great big piece of bread and cheese and he said “Is this him?” Harry said, “That’s jest the feller”.
That would have been between the two wars I think. But that’s amazing how people did travel to the North Country. I suppose it was to the docks or even the coal mines, hoping for work. There was industry up there.
People of nowadays don’t realise how desperately hard up people were in those days. I was fortunate because there was only me at home. But where there was a big family, how they managed goodness knows. My brother Percy was nine years older than me; he was apprenticed to a grocer at Holt and he worked long hours. I was in bed by the time he came home so we didn’t spend much time together.