Wilf: When my stiletto was used to cut my wellies

Sep 12 2009 by Val Javin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

HOW attitudes have changed. Society is against carrying knives and our youth drinking.

This wasn’t the feeling back in the good old days at the 1952 Coronation; Huddersfield school children were given commemorative half pint beer glasses and pen knives. At the time nothing was thought of it.

All Scouts carried sheath knives and I had a stiletto. At Bradley Wood scout camp a scout leader inspecting my knife, tested its sharpness by sticking it through my wellies, thus demonstrating his disgust, not of my having a stiletto, but that I had the gall to bring incorrect softies’ rubber boots to camp.

We Brighouse boys weren’t fine weather campers like the Rastrick scouts with their pressure cookers. We had to suffer. We were only allowed two matches to light a fire. If we failed we had cold water.

Remember the harrowing accounts of freezing winters when folk had to break the ice to wash in? Well, my abiding memory was having to break the fat on top of the cold water so I could wash the plates.

If we could, without being seen, we’d use a cigarette lighter on the fire. Lying in the damp tent I would dream of chopping all the trees down for bonfire night. If only this Bradley wood was nearer home. We’d already thinned out Liliands Wood quite nicely. We were at it before the loggers in South America started clearing the planet.

We contributed to the scarcity of Windsor chairs by burning any we found. Lining up vases and plates to smash with stones and catapults.Fortunately we missed a lot of Clarice Cliffe stuff.

At the end of the week we had to pack all our stuff onto a cart and without benefit of a donkey, drag it back to Brighouse. When we got home we continued work demolishing the Mission on Thornhill Road which had been blasted by a tornado.

Nowadays that’s all changed. My grandson Sam has been away with the scouts. Not camping, as he said: “When you’re paying you don’t want to sleep in a tent.” Did they go to Bradley woods? Did they heck! They went to Mont Blanc and they didn’t go with a cart.

They did have to slum it a little as they didn’t have a chalet maid. Silly old fashioned me asked if they went sledging in the snow. No they lugged down a plastic track.

They got some scraped limbs so I imagine the first aid badge would come in handy. A good time was had by all and on leaving they got a neckerchief half black with white spots and the other white with black spots.

Nobody thinks of the good kids today. The bad attract most attention.

In the good old days we would go to the cinema. Sometimes three times on Saturday. We particularly liked cowboy films; Lash Larue, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rodgers and Trigger his horse, because the gunfire covered the sound of our Diana or Gat slug guns that we fired at the screen. A sort of early version of these ‘Shoot ‘em all’ computer games.

Outside the cinema some kids carried on shooting at birds or putting match heads in the slugs to scare cats. They’d just miss the cat so the slug hit the stones and exploded. That is when they weren’t birds nesting for eggs. Frogs had a bad time.

If they weren’t being used as cricket balls, they were being blown up with straws, floated across the dam and shot.

This attitude to destruction was frowned on by very few, most thought it normal high spirits.In later years I kept finding dead birds in our back yard. They’d been shot with a slug gun. I’d seen the rifle barrel poking out of an upstairs flat window. I went round to confront the guy.

He said,” You can’t prove it’s me.”.

I replied: “That’s true but then again you won’t be able to prove it’s me that put the sugar in your motorbike tank.”

I never could prove it was him but strangely the birds stopped being shot.

This lack of feeling is a legacy from the past. I remember the first sculpture exhibition I ever saw was Epstein’s in Blackpool, but the accompanying exhibition of shrunken heads held more appeal.

I never actually saw any Maori tattooed heads. They were so much sort after by museums that they were produced to order by tattooing slaves. Now the Maoris want them back. We forget these are the remains of someone’s relatives.

Talking of relatives, Great aunt Elsie was fond of shooting. In 1919 on her honeymoon in India she shot the Gharial crocodile pictured above and had it made into two cases and a pair of shoes.

The head, with its plaintive eyes, looks too small for all that skin. Her husband Walter shot a panther. There’s less to show for the memory of the cat, only the small floating shoulder bones. The so-called lucky bones, mounted in gold for a brooch, shown by the cases.

While I was in hospital I remember the ward bore going on at great length about his dad bringing back some skins during the war and how his mum couldn’t decide what to have them made into.

He spoke of every combination of shoes, handbags, suitcases, coats and how she couldn’t decide.

We never found out what she did with them because he paused, and reflecting on the tale said: “Yes my mum was very proud of her four skins.” We burst out laughing. It was made worse by the fact that two of us were in pain from operations (I’d had my top lip stitched back on) and the third had a tracheotomy tube in his throat, which made him sound like a hissing ice warrior from Doctor Who.

This made us laugh even more. The story teller retired to his bed, puzzled. He never asked why we were laughing and we never asked what happened to the skins

Crocodile skin is still popular. Jean Paul Gaultier, director of luxury leather brand, Hermes, says despite the recession, sales are up. It takes three or four to make one handbag at £3,000. They don’t use the old traditional bait method of luring the croc by throwing a young boy on a rope into the water. Hermes rears them in pens. Similar idea to the tattooed heads of the Maori slaves?

P.S. Great uncle Walter died in India from a boil on his neck. Elsie returned to Britain to live in Edinburgh. She spent her later years in Huddersfield.

We still have all her diaries. She wrote a book of poetry which was presented to the Queen Mother. I am writing this article sitting on the stool she used at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 2.

P.P.S. Perhaps Prince Charles will invite me to his Coronation. I did, after all, present him with the Wilf Lunn,’ Battenburg Medal, For eating all his dinner. With custard clusters for not spilling’.

lWilf's autobiography to the age of eleven,ŠMy Best Cellar, can be purchased at Waterstones or via his website www.wilflunn.com