Ghostbuster Lane and Other Stories

I was over at my mum and dad’s house the other day, the area I grew up in, and I saw an old lady walking down the road. I instantly thought to myself, “Oh, there’s The Hunchback” the name my brother and I had labelled this poor woman with years earlier. And it had stuck. Well, in my mind anyway. I now realise she probably has Osteoporosis, and that grimace is likely caused by the pain, not a dislike of small children on bikes, as I had once thought. It got me thinking, as there were other things that I remember from growing up that I still use the childhood names for.

Take, for example, Ghostbuster Lane. Ghostbuster Lane was a lane between houses and a school on our way from home to nursery. We were very small at the time, Ghostbusters was huge, in all the cinemas and stuff, so our mum called that part of our journey ‘Ghostbuster Lane’, and told us that when we were in that lane, that we were invisible. Presumably to make it more exciting for us, as kids need on a boring walk. Either that or she got a huge kick out of telling us big lies. No, I don’t quite imagine my parents conversations were: “Guess what guff I told them today Ian, that they’re invisible! Swallowed it whole! Gullible fools! Hahahahaha”.

Anyway, this invisible thing stayed with us, we believed it for years, and only a few months ago, my brother and I were talking about something local, and used, “Aye, next to Ghostbuster Lane," as a perfectly acceptable location.
I also remember my mum warning us strongly against Getting Dog Poo In Our Eyes. This was very dangerous. It would make us Blind. So we had to always wash our hands when we came in from playing, and had to very careful about eating things like crisps, if we might have been near Dog Poo. There was a big grassy verge behind our house which we called The Field. Nothing like a field actually, it had grass, that was about it. It was very hilly, and every dog in the area used to empty its bowels there. Including us taking our dog. But it wasn’t just the squidgy Dog Poo we had to be careful of, oh no. There was Dried White Dog Poo –equally as dangerous. Because if it got on your hands, you think you’d rubbed it off but nooooo, tiny microbes would still be on your hands and if you happened to rub your eyes, that was it. Blind. We were, naturally very careful about rubbing our eyes, in case of the microbes we couldn’t see, and so we used sleeves. We might have looked slightly retarded eating sweets without our fingers actually touching them at any point, but at least we weren’t going to Go Blind.

My favourite sweet to get was called a ’Ten Pence Mixture’ and it wasn’t just in my own head, I used to go into the shop and ask for it. I would point out which penny sweets I wanted (always the jelly-like ones, not those horrible foamy pink prawns) and the person behind the counter, having handled cash all day, proceeded to pick out which sweets I pointed to and put them into a white paper bag. Without gloves or tongs. Just fingers. Disgusting, now I think back. The shop is still there though, so, if your ever near Hillington, and you fancy a 10p Mixture, my directions might sound a bit like a pirate treasure map. Through Ghostbuster lane, past The Hunchback’s house, cut across The Field – avoiding the Blinding Dog Shit, and the shops are just at the top of the hill.