By Bernie Bell.

I’ve started reading ‘Powsels and Thrums’, Alan Garner’s most recent book.  Mr. Garner explains that in home-weaving powsels and thrums were the oddments of cloth and thread which the weaver would keep for their own use, and that by skilful use of these, families could be clothed.  Using bits to make a whole.

Mr. Garner then presents us with powsels and thrums of his life, bits & pieces, stories which when put together, form his life-story.

The first one, about someone getting locked in a coal-hole, brought to mind a powsel, or thrum, from my childhood.

I was born at 8 Fraser Street, in Bradford.  This was like Coronation Street, well, not the Coronation Street of today where people keep murdering each other!  but it was a row of terraced houses with cobbles in the road. It may not exist now.

Down the street from us lived a woman known as Mucky Beattie, because she was not a cleanly woman – a bit grubby.  Mucky Beattie liked to go out for few drinks of an evening and sometimes got home a bit worse for wear. One evening, she came home… a bit worse for wear, and found that she was locked out of her house. Either she’d forgotten her key, or lost it.

She tried to get into the house via the coal-hole.  She found that she couldn’t fit, as she was quite a hefty sort of body. So, being drunk, she took her clothes off, all of them, and tried again.  She still couldn’t fit and, this time, she stuck fast, stark naked, drunk, and a bit more mucky than usual from the coal. And there she stayed ’til someone came along and got her out.

The story doesn’t tell how they got her out, maybe lard was used to lubricate.

The moral is…….trying to get back into a house via the coal-hole, isn’t always a good idea.

Mucky Beattie used to collect the horse-shit from the Rag-and-bone man’s horse and sell it.  That didn’t help with the grubbiness, at all.

Then, Mr. Garner tells of the experience of taking the entrance examination for Grammar School, which is another powsel of my own.

In 1966, 20 years after  Mr. Garner took his exam, I and some others from my school were taken to a hall where we sat an exam. Very wisely, we weren’t told what the exam was, how much it mattered and what was riding on it. We were told it was just a test.

I passed that ‘test’ and, basically that set the course of my life ahead.

I have to admit that I don’t think I would have thought of his very inventive answer to Part 2, Section A of the exam.  But I’m not Alan Garner.  To catch your interest, I’ll quote the end of it…

“……so I gripped the edge of the car and vaulted over the side to wake myself up.  This was only a dream. But it wasn’t.”

I like it that me and Alan Garner have that specific, similar powsel, or thrum.  At this point I’m still not clear which is which!

Alan’s first reaction to Grammar School, was to be over-whelmed.  I’m calling him Alan now, as I feel I’m getting to know him.

This is where our experiences differ.  I’m the youngest of four sisters, and all three of my older sisters had been to that school too, having each passed the ’11 Plus’

So I felt that I almost knew the place, and the teachers. Mrs Plunkett-Jones – Games Mistress (seriously, that was her name)  taught us all Games, with varying degrees of success depending on our interest and ability.  I stolidly refused to try to hit a small ball with a round stick, or to let go of the side in the swimming pool.  I now realise that was foolish, but no-one explained to me the actual benefits of knowing how to swim. I lived in Bradford – why would I need to be able to swim?   As far as I was concerned, the water was cold and I DIDN’T WANT TO BE THERE!

One of the student Games teachers tried pushing me in. I just floundered about and went under a couple of times, until one of my class-mates, knowing me better than the teacher did, dived in and saved me.

Imagine the trouble that teacher would be in these days!  Allegedly that method does work sometimes, but it failed spectacularly with me.

Different times.

Funnily enough – Alan was pushed into a swimming pool by his Uncle, with the intention of ‘teaching him to swim’.  He says he still can’t swim.  Neither can I.

Alan describes the teachers and how their approach to teaching influenced his learning.   Some of them were trying to adapt to post-war life, as much as the pupils were trying to adapt to  their new school.  I’ll quote again,  re. one of the teachers who…

“….after leading a bombing raid on Hamburg, had jumped into the night over Holland from his burning aircraft when he saw he could not get his dead crew’s bodies home, and had spent three years afterwards in Stalag Luft 3, yet, some days, could not keep order in the class but would sit with as white face and rigid neck tendons and stare at us, seeing something else.”

To be continued…..as long as our powsels and thrums continue to chime together.

---