The magical years

The magical years

Despite football being my favourite past time me and some of my friends used to love fishing.

Do you recall the days standing at play time in the school yard talking to your mates and sometimes lying to them ,I caught a 3lbs pike out of the Perry Barr canal on Saturday hehe /forum/smilies/smile_smiley.gifI do, but I had never even seen a pike unless it was in a book.

After about 2 and 1/2 weeks of begging my old man for £30 I bought my first fibre class rod to replace my old cane thing I picked up somewere,along with a keepnet a landing net and some other bits,remember for us anyway 30 bucks was 3 weeks pocket money, and that included school money for the sweet shop, my friend Percy who was older than me took £25 for the lot an and he was chuffed as he bragged about the carbon rod he was buying with the 25 quid, he was a bit of a smart arse but I had the better of him and dad and kept the fiver to buy 2 pint of maggots ,before that it was just half a pint and as many worms I could dig up out the garden.

My mates Chris and Scott had been night fishing at Sutton park in brum and was going again the next Friday and fishing until saturday, i had to ask dad and mom if I could go being 13 ,dad told me no you cannot, but after a boat load of ear bending them and some planning Chris’s dad phoned the old man and the big fishing session was on.

We all could not wait until school ended on friday,we had maths for the last to lessons and could not wait until it was over so we could start the weekend.
Chris’s dad picked us up at 3.15 and dropped me home to pick up my gear up,scotts house next and then the tackle shop for bait,i bought my first swim feeder as I had a plan I had read from one of the fishing papers .I recall seeing Chris’s mom for the first time at his house and thought wow she’s lovely, she looked a bit like wonder woman well me and Scott thought she did ,we had dinner ,beef burgers chips and beans and set of down to powels pool sotton park.

We set up our gear and Chris’s dad watched it and we walked over to the parkies hut to get our tickets 75p each. It got dark about 10pm in the summer and Chris’s dad said behave yourselves and I come back around 6 am in the morning to see how you are getting on, neither of us had a bite during the night ,so we got into scotts tent a just dropped off. I got up 1st about 5 am and casted once again into the pool with the feeder on and bang of the line went, it was a bream about 2lbs,scott and Chris got all interested again and cast out i must have been into a good shoal of bream I took 5 or 6 out that morning and a tench,chris and Scott caught nowt,you see I had read up on swim feeders and it beat the float hands down that day, and did for a long time after ,i remember Scott put a huge lead on I think I must have weighed about six oz,he thought if he could cast out to the centre of the lake he could get a few, but after repeatedly trying to cast it far enough the end section of his rod came off and went about 50ft out into the pool and got snagged up.
Of course there after I was the best fisherman in the school yard and made sure everyone knew it.
Pity fishing is not so much fun when you’re older ay

Paul.

You lost me paul,when you mentioned,£30 being 3 weeks pocket money!

3 shillings more like it, until paper round gave me 10bob a week

Bet you still enjoyed yourself fred/forum/smilies/wink_smiley.gif ten bob is that 50p,i wonder how many maggots you could get with that these days.

Paul

Eee when I was a lad we made do with a bit of nicked garden cane and a bent pin from me mums darning kit. Only nets we saw were hair nets. Floats made out of bit of cork and then stand there all day until you wellies were wet and cold catching bugger all except the odd suicidal perch!

"You lost me paul,when you mentioned,£30 being 3 weeks pocket money!"

Yes Fred, I thought I was doing ok with a Half Crown (12.5 new pence) a week for pocket money.

And the average wage was around £20; now I get almost double that in1 hour.

I cant remember how much a pint of Gentles (Maggots) were in those days. /forum/smilies/smile_smiley.gif

I seem to remember sixpence (6d)for half a pint around 1964.At that time I worked all day each Saturday in a shop for £1 and gave half of it to me mum!

I'm realising that although I still think I'm 21 I must now lookold to policemen and teachersand positively ancient to anyone still at school!

this was my pocket money...............click

but my nan would give me another if I sneaked bets on for her !

What sort of threepence was that Cakey, that's a new one.

These are what I started with


Oh, sorry Cakes, I see further down they have a picture of an old Thrupenny Joey.

I liked the 6 sided thrupenny bit- nice and heavy for throwing into a herd of commonfolk -hit1 one the head and he'd fall downand be trampled in the scrum for the coin

Happy days indeed

/forum/smilies/big_smile_smiley.gif/forum/smilies/big_smile_smiley.gif

All you young whipersnappers make me laugh, when I was a lad there were very few cars. Horses and carts were the main form of transport and were use to move everything. The poor old horses that pulled the coal coal wagons, which weighed about 10 ton loaded, regularly popped their clogs in the road and had to be dragged in by the knackers.

It was still a common practice to stuff young boys up chimneys, now days you can't even tell them off.

To talk about £30 being three weeks pocket money is unbelievable, when I started work at 15 years of age it took me four months to earn £30.

They really were the good old days and by the way if you wanted maggots you bred your own.

Spoilt Brats!!!

......hand full o' freezin cowd gravel. All 'uddled in t'corner fo' fear o' fallin'....

Boiled sprats????

<blockquote class=quoteheader>Matt Corker wrote (see)</blockquote><blockquote class=quote>......hand full o' freezin cowd gravel. All 'uddled in t'corner fo' fear o' fallin'....</blockquote>
That was only in the pubs Matt. My poor old mother used to buy a sheeps head on payday, she always got the butcher to leave the eyes in just to see us through the week.

When I was a kid a school dinner lady gave me a pig's nose - about 3/4" sliced off the end of one. Her husband was a butcher.

I had it for about a week until it got a bit smelly, but had lots of funny sticking on windows and freaking out the little girls (it didn't get me any).

A week later she brought me a sheeps eye with all the dangly bits. I kept it in a jar of water so it looked like the body bits in jars that you saw on films. My jar wasn't filled with preservative though and after a couple of weeks I opened the jar and.......uurgh!

This isn't going anywhere by the way, no funny punchline or anything. That's it, a short childhood annecdote about bits from the butchers

Hay guys thanks ive just turned thirty seven and had that feeling of old age catching up with me,but however i feel young now once again,,,,cheers/forum/smilies/angel_smiley.gif