I have always had vivid dreams and I consider myself lucky that I often remember them in minute details. One weird thing tends to crop up in my dreams more than anything else though - our old house in Manchester at 90 Moss Vale Road.
Sometimes it's just part of a normal dream - being used as a familiar location for some kind of wild adventure. But often it is something darker. I find myself waking up screaming - I am not afraid to admit this - I have nightmares still, and Buffy can verify the hurried breathing that often precedes an early morning scream! But more often than not, my nightmares are based around the house at 90 Moss Vale Road. It's weird to think that I only lived there for 11 years before I joined the army in 1987 and yet now, 35 years later, this normal-looking house forms the background to the worst fears playing out in my dozing state.
I suppose it might be to do with the timing and when we lived there - It was where most of my childhood memories stem from and therefore where most of my learning took place. There are so many memories of the house, the garden and the surrounding area embedded into my mind, it probably makes sense that this is the place my brain decides to enact its terrors while I sleep! That's not to say I actually have many actual bad memories of 90 Moss Vale Road though - on the contrary, as I look through old photos, all that comes to mind are good and interesting things and so I thought I should start to wind down the Davey story by mentioning a few of these!
One of the biggest memories of 90 Moss Vale Road is the motorway. I mentioned in an earlier post that instead of houses facing us from the opposite side of the road, we had a 30-foot high yellow stone wall, atop which was the M63 motorway.
One really interesting thing happened in the mid-80s - the motorway was only two lanes wide and was filling up with traffic daily, so they decided to widen the entire thing to 3 lanes. Now, for a lot of the road this just meant adding another lane at the side of the current 2 lanes - maybe digging up part of a field - But for us, we had the bridge over Winchester Road (We lived on the corner of Winchester and Moss Vale) and so we wondered how they would widen this bridge without having to close both roads for weeks.
It turned out that they closed the road for just one weekend - Friday night till Sunday night and in that time, they brought out bulldozers, which quite literally knocked down the old bridge in a couple of hours. They then put metal beams across the chasm and in a little over 24 hours built a whole new 3-lane motorway (6 lanes in total) before re-opening the Motorway and Winchester Road in time for Monday morning rush hour. It was a great weekend, spent out in the garden watching the machines demolish and rebuild the road. Here are a few photos of the weekend...
There were lots of other fun memories of the roads around our house too - I remember one summer the road at the front of the house flooded in some incredible rain - we spent a couple of hours one afternoon paddling along the street avoiding the traffic coming around what was a blind corner at the time and Rascal loved getting dirty in the deep mud we had in the garden, before dad had planted his vegetable garden a couple of years later.
The corner of Moss Vale and Winchester has a lot of memories. Not only because our house was right on the corner, but because both roads were pretty busy we had our fair bit of action there.
One morning in winter - probably about 1983 or 1984, we were getting ready for school and we heard a loud bang at the front of the house. A car had come around the corner and slammed into our front gate post, which at the time was a pretty significant 5-foot high solid brick construction. It had happened a few times before as the corner can be tight and people often misjudged it. But when a second car hit it again a few minutes later we had to stop to watch. Someone had minor injuries in the 2nd crash and so an ambulance was called. Before it arrived there was a 3rd and maybe even a 4th crash. It turned out the cold weather and rain had caused a sheet of black ice to form on the road and we could only laugh when the Ambulance finally turned up and ended up also skidding on the ice and smashing into our hardened gate post! It was a fun morning. I believe there were about 7 or 8 smashes including the ambulance before the ice eventually melted away. I wish I had photos, of that day - all I have are happy memories of waiting in anticipation for the next car to turn the corner and smash!!!
This photo of me was taken with me sitting on the gate post - you can see how significant it was!
Another time we had a small van burst into flames just a few yards down the street and watched as a Fire Engine came by to douse the fire.
One of the saddest crashes though happened late one Saturday night. A driver coming up Winchester Road completely missed the left turn onto Moss Vale and somehow ended up on its roof by our back gates having knocked down the beautiful red telephone box that sat on the corner next to the house. It was really sad because they replaced the Traditional red phone box (Model k6) with some weird American-style yellow phone booth. It just wasn't the same and it was so bad I don't even have a photo of it - Just the before and after of the old wonderful phone box and the car on its roof!
Here is a before, during and after photo of the phone box!
I have so many memories of the house in Manchester it would be impossible to recall them all. I wish we could go back and take more photos and even some videos but of course, that's impossible.
I have memories of dropping darts from the upstairs landing whilst Chris stuck his head out on the ground floor, dodging the projectile until I paused and dropped it a few seconds early, scoring a direct hit in his head! (Or did Chris drop it in my head?) Gareth - I remember dropping darts into Chris's head too. Chris - has memories of both Gareth and I doing it The only consistent things in any of these memories about dart dropping, are that darts were dropped and that they were dropped into Chris's head! Poor Chris - hahaha
Then I remember chasing Chris around the house after playing with football cards and his slamming his bedroom door on the little finger of my left hand. Blood seeping down the painted woodwork - to this day the finger on my lefthand is visibly thinner than the one on my right!
Mum and especially dad were constantly moving things around the house and painting or decorating - The living room became the dining room, then the sofa was moved, then mum and dad swapped bedrooms from front to back and then Gareth or Chris moved rooms - it was endless, but it did feel like things were always being updated.
The TV was also changed quite often - We had a deal with Radio Rentals in the days before people actually owned TVs'. We rented ours from the store in Stretford ( Chris - It was originally from Radio Rentals in Urmston, not Stretford - The building that is now the Wetherspoons pub!) and I remember as we went from a standard TV with push buttons on top that you had to get up to change channels, to one with a wired remote control - a cable snaked from the TV across the floor to the remote control that dad usually held, to change between the 3 possible channels - BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. Then in 1982, everything changed when Channel 4 started. It was unbelievable to see the 4th channel and soon we also had a remote control without a cable too, so you could change without ever leaving the sofa! Technology back them was amazing!
Then came along Video Recorders - Of course, they were too expensive to buy, so we got ours from Radio Rentals too alongside a new TV package.
I actually remember the first two movies we rented when we got our Video Recorder - Jaws and a movie called Used Cars - a terrible movie about dodgy car salesmen, with a few too many boobs in it for kids - definitely picked by dad I think!
Of course, the Video Recorders as the name implied, were supposed to be for recording TV, so we would all have our own personal VHS Video Tape and would be able to program the video to record whatever TV shows we wanted unless someone else had already set it to record theirs!
There were definitely times when there were clashes and things got unprogrammed and someone got pissed off at missing a TV show and back then, it might never be shown again! The clocks on the videos weren't that accurate either, so quite often we would miss the last 2 or 3 minutes of a TV show and never find out what happened! Or you would make sure to start the recording early anfd finish it late, which was fine if no one else wanted to record anything. If they did then the timings would clash and someone would be unhappy! You kids today don't know how lucky you are with Netflix, Amazon Prime and all the other millions of channels and streming options out there as well as the bottomless pit of downloadable free stuff that is available.
This isn't a great photo below - But in the corner on the right-hand side, you can see the old top-loading video recorder inside the wooden shelf/security device made by dad. This homemade wooden shelf was supposed to stop it from getting nicked by burglars, but I remember at least once it was gone one morning after we got broken into.
When we went on holiday, dad used to actually remove the video recorder and put it inside mum's wheeled shopping trolley and hide it under the floorboards in the pantry while we were away!
Also, check out the old Telephone on the table and the really big stripy settee and chairs.
There were some times when the TV didn't get moved around to watch during dinner - well two times - one was when our snooker table was set up.
The snooker table was bought as a joint Christmas present between the three of us and was a 5-foot-long table. It normally stood folded up in the corner of the dining room out of the way. It would be moved out once every few months and stay in place for a week or two, while we played tournaments and invited mates around to play. The dining table would get folded away instead and we would eat dinner in the front room instead - so the TV didn't have to move! (Gareth - I ruled the world on that snooker table!)
The other time the TV wasn't switched around for dinner was Christmas - Now Christmas was a pretty good time on most years. Nan, Catherine and Brenda would come around to ours for most of the day and we would play with our new gifts until dinner was ready at 3pm - in time to watch the Queen, before tucking into dinner. (Maybe the TV got swung around for the Queen? I don't know!!) Dinner was always nice at Christmas then we would veg out in front of the Christmas day TV until everyone went home and it was time for bed.
One year, after Gareth joined the army there was a big Christmas bust-up - As far as I remember Gareth had asked for a sandwich before dinner and dad had commented, 'It's like a kick in the teeth', or something similar, as he was the one cooking dinner. A shouting match followed and then Gareth stormed upstairs followed by dad and more shouting through a slammed bedroom door.
If I remember right Brenda and Nan decided to go home and had to be fchased by someone to bring them back in time for dinner. It all calmed down by then, but years later it's still a good family Christmas memory!
That's pretty much all my memories of daft little things that happened in the house!
One thing I promised I would do in an earlier post was to mention a little more about The Farm - It was discussed in an earlier post about holidays, but it was a constant in our younger years and a huge part of our lives as we grew up.
Mum and dad remained friends with Robert and Dorothy for years and years and still met up with them once or twice a year until well into the 2000s. We would visit a couple of times a year and loved our holidays there. Sometimes we would stay in the farmhouse itself and at other times we would take the caravan and park it up there. But the one thing we would all agree on was we loved our holidays there -
Lots of time was spent swimming and splashing in the River Ellen, Playing hide and seek in the evenings around the farm - hiding in the barns and under tractors or wherever we could - playing with the two farm kids, (Robert and Dorothy's kids) who lived there and worked on the farm year around - Helen and Andrew. They were a little older than us, but they always played and had fun with us.
We got rides on hay stacks on Tractor trailers and got to feed the cows and help with milking as well as playing with the house dogs (The farm dogs were wild as fuck and would take your hand off, but the house dogs that lived in the actual house were great!!) They were great times and we all have great memories of our times there! Our holidays there really taught us a lot about how different living in the countryside was and definitely meant that to this day we all still have a soft spot for the Lake District.
Here are a few pics of the fun we used to have!
What I set out to do when I started this 'Davey Blog', was to give a fun and interesting look into the history of our family alongside some of the photos I scanned from mum and dad's old photo albums.
It would have been a shame for these photos and memories to have been forgotten forever like so much is nowadays. I think I have almost achieved everything I set out to do.
I have to end it somewhere though and so the next update will be the final part of the Davey family story. I will talk about the last few years in Manchester and how the Davey family 'nest' at Moss Vale emptied as we 3 boys (and Mum and Dad surprisingly) spread our wings, departed and began the next stage in our lives!
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