| When I was small,
the milkman who delivered milk to our door, every day except Sundays, always
wore fingerless gloves. I’m sure they were practical items for his job;
warm about the hands but still allowing the fingers to do what is so difficult
in gloves with fingers. Jobs such as picking up, and not dropping, the
empty milk bottles, by sticking his fingers into the necks of the bottles,
or writing my mum’s order and sorting out her change when she paid the
weekly bill.
He worked for the Co-op dairy and to my young mind was very old indeed. I can’t remember anything else about him quite as clearly as his gloves. He may have worn a white overall and a blue stripy apron but I’m not certain, and that seems more like the classic butcher's uniform. I think he had a weather worn face and brown hair that was always trying to leave his head. Most likely he was going bald and was combing the remnants over his balding head, giving the wind something to grab hold of. But my strongest memory is of the gloves; woollen, knitted, fingerless gloves. They were blue, I think. They may have been made fingerless or he may have cut them off with a pair of scissors, but that seems unlikely as I’m sure they would have unravelled, leaving him with a handful of useless wool. NEXT |
| As I imagine him
I can remember the old tan, leather satchel, worn and time polished, that
he used to carry his order book and cash. It jangled with all of his change,
big pre-decimal coins; pennies an inch and a half across, some up to fifty
or sixty years old and stamped with Queen Victoria’s worn out profile,
the classic twelve-sided, threepenny bit or thruppence, jolly, jolly thruppence,
neat round sixpences made for children’s hands, thick silver florins and
the magnificent half crown. If ever I had a half crown I was rich. He would
rummage around in the satchel and bring out the coins, nestling in the
woollen palm, sort them out and hand them to my mum as change for a ten-shilling
note. The 50 pence piece is just not the same.
My own gloves were mittens, so different from his that they were almost an alien species, like lobster claws. In their own way they too were fingerless. But that was because they turned four little fingers into one big one, leaving the thumb on its own. My mittens were linked by a long piece of wool that ran up the sleeve of my green anorak and across my back. If it wasn’t cold the mittens would hang suspended from my sleeves, like a second pair of hands. I was always losing things and I even managed to lose a pair of stringed mittens, running through Woodley woods. One glove must have caught on a branch and snapped the wool, unnoticed by me with my mind, as always, on other things. The other snaked out as I ran with my brother to see a train pass as it flew by the edge of the wood. |
| Looking back on
it the gloves were a symbol of a different England, an England of the early
sixties and less than ten years after the end of rationing; a leftover
deprivation from the War. An England where people made do and seemed happy
with what they had. Unlike today when everything is throwaway and people
always want more. It was an England before the Beatles were number one
with ‘She loves you’, before England won the world cup of 1966, an England
before this country and its capital, swinging London, became, for a brief
moment, the centre of the universe.
Even milk was different in those days. I don’t think it could be bought in a shop then and was always delivered by a dairy. You could only have silver top or gold top. My mum always had gold top and she loved the cream, either in her coffee or on her breakfast cereal. Now it seems rare and odd to have milk delivered. Instead you get milk from supermarkets, garages and corner shops. And these days you have so much choice, you can get skimmed and semi-skimmed milk; red top and green top. You can get milk in waxed cardboard or plastic, in one-pint, two-pint, four-pint and eight-pint containers. You can get milk with extra calcium and milk that isn’t called milk anymore but some stupid marketing-led brand name. NEXT |
| When I was a schoolchild
we had free milk every day, helping to build strong teeth and bones. It
was free milk until Thatcher put a stop to it when Heath’s Conservatives
were in power. It was the first time I ever heard of her. Maybe she cut
her milk teeth on free milk and schoolchildren before graduating to persecution
of lame duck businesses, the unemployed, the miners and the new-age travellers,
while at the same time she encouraged her children, the yuppies, to want
more and more in this modern, throwaway society.
I have a pair of fingerless gloves myself, and my more recent and personal memories of fingerless gloves go back about 17 years and the post punk music scene. Often walking miles to gigs in Reading or up in London in the cold, black jeans too tight to shove my hands into, gloves were essential. Ordinary gloves were just too uncool but fingerless gloves were fine, as long as they were black. Leaving just the tips of the fingers free it was easy to keep just about warm by making a fist or shoving just the tips of my fingers into the pockets. I still wear them, when it gets cold, and when I do, I always remember the milkman. TOP |