Ted Beckett is just an ordinary lad from Botcherby in Carlisle. He was born on Hitler’s birthday in 1944, and, now, well into his 70s, he’s remembering the past.

He remembers playing conkers. And he knew how to cheat by hardening the chestnut: you would “get your mam to boil the conker in vinegar”, or you could persuade your big sister to give it two coats of her hardest nail varnish.

At the end of the day his mam “would plonk a huge plate of whatever down in front of him” and say, “Captain Ahab, eat your tea before it gets cold”. And later, when all the excuses for not going to bed had been exhausted, his father would send him packing with the words, “Get up those wooden hills to Bedfordshire.”

The highlight of his year when he was a child was the Botcherby carnival. They would dress up as “cowboys and Indians, Zulu warriors, kings, spacemen, all following the decorated tractor upon which was our carnival queen and her attendant princesses”.

When he was a teenager, he’d regularly walk the six miles from his home at 33 Botcherby Avenue to see “the love of his life” who lived at 6 Cherry Garth in “the tiny village of Cargo on the opposite side of Carlisle’s fair city”.

He’d often arrive looking like a “soaking wet bag of rags” to meet his girl’s father, Wilf, standing there with a 12-bore shotgun. He’d say: “ ‘I’m not daft, lad, you’re not walking all this way for nowt,’ then, clicking the trigger, causing me to almost jump out of my skin, would say, ‘I am watching you, lad.’ “

Ted remembers the days when Workington Reds came to town. He was eight and a half and didn’t have the tanner to pay to get into the ground.

He had the choice, either to struggle over the tall iron fence with its sharp serrated edge, or find a hole big enough to crawl through and risk tearing a hole in his kegs. He was too afraid of his mam to get a hole in his kegs, so, along with the other lads, he had to stand outside, listening to the roar of the crowd and trying to work out what was going on.

His only other encounter with sport was when the Olympian weightlifter, Geoff Capes, threatened to “wrap an iron bar round my scrawny neck if I didn’t stop bothering him”. It is one anecdote Ted leaves unfinished.


A Wet Thursday Afternoon In later years, Ted and his wife, Renée, fancied moving out of Botcherby and living in the countryside. They responded to an advert to rent a cottage at Rose Castle.

They were interviewed by the bishop, the Rev Graham Dow, “in what appeared to be his gardening clothes, complete with big holes in the elbows of his cardigan and some careworn baggy trousers.” After a bucolic summer, Ted and Renee had a miserable winter in the ancient freezing cottage with the heating constantly breaking down. At one point the phone rang. It was the Bishop. He said: “Excuse me for disturbing you, but I think your chimney may be on fire.’ Talk about an understatement ... it was like a huge bloody roman candle.”

Reading Ted Beckett's A Wet Thursday Afternoon (£9.99) is like having a pint with an old man in a pub. Preferably The Magpie in Botcherby.

He rambles on about this and that, sharing interesting memories and colourful phrases.

But he has a good memory for the past, for the way things were so very different even half a century ago. In another 50 years time, social historians will turn to people like Ted if they want to know what life was like for ordinary people in Botcherby, or Carlisle, or in the north a century ago.

Review by STEVE MATTHEWS
Bookends, Carlisle and Keswick
www.bookscumbria.com