| Dialect: ’Ello My ’Andsome with Randle Hurley |
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’Eello My Andsome. Ee’s some lovely to see ee. Commost on in an I’ll put on a nice dish of tay and we can have a sit down. I still got a couple of mince pies left. Found ’em in the bottom of the freezer. Want one do ee? You’re some lucky you caught me. I been out the back court to bring my bin in. Ee ’aven’t been emptied. No wonder really cos ee idn’ Tuesday at all. I got the day wrong. And ee was recyclin’ day this week. I shall be overflowin’ with rubbish soon and I got fish heads in the bin. They’re goin’ te stink enough to make ee heave by next week if this warm weather de keep up. I would dig em out of the bin and heave em in the slab fire but what wind there is, is comin’ from the North and that de make the chimney smoke. Burnt fish heads! That’ll be some smeech that will and I don’t want that in the house. Better keep em in the bin and put up with the stink of un. Now, what made me forget about recycling day? I dunno but that de remind me of my uncle Jasper. He was a recycler before anybody knew anythin’ a’tall ‘bout recyclin’. Ee wadn’t my uncle really. Ee was my Grannie’s second husband. That would make un my step granddad I s’pose. But, soon after ee married Gran ee asked we grand children “what you goin te call me? Grandad don’t seem right some how, so how about Uncle Jasper?” That suited we so Uncle Jasper ee was ever after. Ee was some lovely man, Uncle Jasper. Skinny little chap he was. Not much taller that Grannie, an she wadn’t very big. His big problem was eyesight. Ee didn’t hardly have none and ee wouldn’t wear no glasses neither. Every time I seen un in the street and said “ello, Uncle Jasper”, ee’d say “ello Chrischefer”. Why ee called my cousin Christopher I dunno! Ee was always good for a chat though, was Jasper and ee ad loads of interesting stories. Best thing, though, if you didn’t have time to talk, you could walk right past un and is eyes were so bad, ee wouldn’t know you were there. Jasper had been many things in his time. He told me about when he was a postman. Apparently, when he took the Post Office exams he only got one word wrong in the spellin’ test. He got the “razed” in “razed to the ground” bit wrong. But, like he said ‘raised’ to the ground seemed sort of contrary to ee and put he off his stroke for a bit. When ee first joined the Star Tea Company ee was sent out deliverin’ in the works van. They was goin’ down Prince’s Street and Jasper said to the other feller: “Look, some poor chap have lost his wheel.” They watched the wheel roll down the hill in front of them and then, their van slowly sank on one side! Didn’t seem to matter much though cos he rose te become manager in the end. When I knew un, after he married Grannie, he was mostly retired but he had a few odd jobs he used to do. He used to sell papers down the station and seemed to have the use of one of the station porters’ trolleys. His trolley was bigger than he was but you never saw un without ‘he’s truck’. He used to bring home orange boxes from the greengrocers on the trolley. It was my job to chop them up for firewood for the slab in the kitchen and to collect and straighten all the nails. What Jasper did with all they nails I don’t knaw. They orange boxes was some useful though. You could make go-carts out of they. You’d cut away most of one narrow side and then nail the bottom onto a plank. You could nail axels on, front and back, and attach pram wheels. If you was a master go-cart maker you would put on steering and breaks but they was a luxury the younger boys usually did without. Good job there wadn’t much traffic in they days! Eer! Remember bows and arrows? How there weren’t more eyes lost I shan’t never know. In our gang we all made bows and arrows and, while we didn’t usually shoot them at each other like some gangs did, we used to try and shoot them ‘out of sight’. If they disappeared ‘out of sight’ when you shot them straight up, this was thought to be a ‘good shot’. What we didn’t think about was, if they disappeared, you couldn’t see em coming down! Well, we waddn’ nothing but little tackers and didn’t knaw nothing much. Good job there was usually a bit of wind blowin’ and the arrows usually landed a bit of a way from where we was standin’ to. One of the bigger boys who lived near me, he made a bow so big that he had to nail it to an old chair as a frame. He sat in the chair, braced he’s self with his feet and pulled the string back with both hands. He’d got special arrows which were more spears than arrows! We all gathered round for the first shot to see how far it would go. Luckily for the local inhabitants, we were all disappointed because the spear didn’t even make it to the end of his garden and the project was abandoned. How did I get onto that? I remember, I was telling ee about Jasper. One of his odd jobs was collectin’ waste paper for the sports club. He had a store down on the harbour and a press to make bales of paper ready for collectin’. Everything went on handsome for a bit. Jasper got me to help him with the balin’. You mind ee was some small? Well, he had to throw the handle of the baler up ‘til it caught on the ratchet. Next he would jump up, hang on to the handle and pull it back down to compress the bale. This was some hard work for Uncle Jasper so, me bein’ tall, I had to work the handle. The bales were collected regularly, the sports club did well and they paid Jasper who paid me some extra pocket money for my help proper job. Until the bottom dropped out of the waste paper market that is. We was stuck with a load of bales what nobody wanted and it was left to poor old Jasper to get rid of ’em. Jasper scheemied some lot before settlin’ on a bonfire. He carted the bales over to the Eastern Green beach one night as the tide was dropping. The paper would burn well ‘cos paper did, diddn’ uh? What was left would be quenched by the tide coming back in and washed away, out to sea. What Jasper didn’t allow for was that if you compressed paper into bales, you were trying to set fire to git tree trunks with nothing but a box of Swan Vestas. He managed to get a bit of a blaze going but soon most the paper was washed away by the incoming tide. ‘That’s that’ thought Jasper and went home to bed and thought no more of the matter until the next Thursday. There in the headlines of The Cornishman: ‘Tons of paper washed onto Lord St Levan’s private beach on The Mount”. Poor old Jasper kept is head down for a few weeks after that. That was the end of my extra pocket money until I had a brilliant idea. All round Penzance was cigarette machines. They generally took two shilling pieces and the change was put into the packets. Most of the fags was sold to chaps a bit under the influence, on their way home from the pub. I imagined much cussin’ and swearin’ if the coin was rejected and no fags were forthcoming. I also imagined the drunks not having the sense to look in the rejected coin slot. After that I got up very early on Saturday and Sunday mornings to do a round of all the machines to collect my extra pocket money. I got a lead two bob bit once. Seem’d te me, somebody’d made a mould out of a milk bottle top and cast the coin in scrap lead. They forgot that the machines worked on weight as well as size. I still got that two bob somewhere. Now my robin, we goin’ up te St Just one week? You knaw, to the music evenings I told ee about some time ago. Tuesdays they are I did hear tell. You never knaw, we might be lucky and find a couple of maidens te take home. There now, I thought the idea of that might make ee a bit more enthusiastic. How bout next week then? Meet ee down the First and Last ‘bout half past six te catch the bus? Handsome. See ee then. Bye Now |