Between the Mountains and the Gantries

In a small kitchen house, two is company, three's a crowd, and any more than that needs crowd control. If a squabble erupts, you have to read the Riot Act, and clear the kitchen. "Out, out inta th' street, youse." And so the four of us, my brother, two sisters and I, would find ourselves, not always unwillingly, sitting on the kerb of a footpath, which the Yanks call a 'sidewalk', waiting for a game to start, or just waiting.

It was a good spot to wait, at street level, because you could see everything that passed up and down the street: horse drawn carts, men in gabardine coats, and if it was a Sunday, men with greyhounds and gunny sacks that wriggled, other men with hurley sticks, children you didn't know, all of them from the district at the bottom of your street and parading up your street, Alliance Road, as if they owned it. The nerve of them!

You had to watch out for huge hairy hooves and creaking cart wheels that made you pull in your feet for fear of having your toes squashed. If the horse stopped beside you, you had to make yourself scarce and find a fresh spot: the horse might have a weak bladder. If it was a mare, you moved toward its head, if a stallion, toward its rear, where you ran the risk, however, that its bowel was overloaded. You never had to look out for motor cars; a motor car on the street was as rare as a docker coming home sober on a Friday night.

Several horse-drawn vehicles went up and down the street every day and over the space of a week. The first one arrived early in the morning, somewhere between six and seven, and so I rarely saw it, much less sat on the kerb waiting for it. I was usually in bed when it came along. If you slept lightly, you would hear the rattle of milk crates and creak of wheels, and a moment later the tinkle of bottles at your front door, when the milkman picked up empties, and you could go back to sleep knowing that there was milk for your porridge and tea. Or get up, if that was your inclination. It was never mine. I didn't like to get out of bed when the world was just beginning to scratch itself; it's catching.

an extract from the memoir by Will Morrison, Between the Mountains and the Gantries, published by Appletree Press.