Another Miracle?
Created | Updated Dec 21, 2006
I suppose I would have been about ten years old at the time, and Dad thought it about time I made myself useful. So on Saturday mornings and school holidays he would take me on his bike to his current building site, with me standing with one foot on the step screwed onto the hub of his back wheel. (This was before we had our first car, the workmen used our two handcarts with 'Baynes Bros.' written on the sides). There I would sweep up the rooms behind the painters, do odd jobs, and make the men's tea over a fire between four bricks at 'docky time'.
We lived in East Barnet behind and over the shop in 'Jubilee Terrace' (built in Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee Year, which was also the year of my father's birth), which Dad had taken over from the previous builder in 1922. It was more of a nuisance than a shop, but we did have a limited stock, comprising wallpaper, paint, gas mantles (upright, inverted and bijou), gaslight globes, torch batteries, and a few other odds and ends.
The counter housed a hand operated wallpaper trimming machine, which I was taught to use (and was frequently grumbled at by our paperhangers for deviating from the straight and narrow). It wasn't a particularly easy job, as one had to turn the handle with the right hand, and steer the paper as it ran through the two pairs of cutting wheels with a lever on the left. Because then the paper was not rolled evenly, unlike now. I can hear the machine's clatter yet.
Since nearly everyone papered their walls in those days, the trimmings soon mounted up. It became my regular job to burn these every week or so. Pymmes Brook ran past our back yard, and on its bank stood our incinerator. This was an old oblong galvanized hot water tank with a few holes knocked in the bottom and sides. It had a seven inch diameter hole in the top, through which the trimmings had to be thrust. It was raised up off the ground on a few bricks. Once the fire got going it would begin to glow cherry red, and the galvanizing would melt and shine.
I always wore boots as a child, as Dad thought our ankles needed supporting, and the long laces were tied with a double knot when we put them on, which never came loose during the day. One afternoon when I had the incinerator glowing hot, the trimmings got stuck in the aperture. I could not move the blockage with the stick I normally used, so I thoughtlessly stamped on the jammed paper with my booted foot. The trimmings went into the fiery furnace, but unfortunately so did my foot. I tried instinctively to snatch my foot out, but it was jammed in, like the monkey with his hand in the coconut shell. Instead, my snatching pulled me down. Seeing my face nearing the red hot top, I thrust my hands onto it instead. They skidded on the melted galvanizing, and the next thing I knew was finding myself lying in the shallow brook six feet down the bank. My boot was left behind, presumably in the tank. I'll never know how my securely tied boot came off to release me. In theory I should have pulled the tank down on top of me. Miracle number one.
My palms and fingers now looked like old cheese, and the pain in them was terrible. I clambered up the bank to run the fifty yards to our scullery, and Mum found me with my hands under the tap. She ran me to our doctor's a quarter of a mile or so away, who put ointment on them and bandaged them up, telling her to leave them bound for a week. I had to be waited on hand, foot and bottom. When the bandages came off the old cheese was stuck to them and, by some miracle, my hands and fingers were covered in lovely new pink skin.
