Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

door bell put on the fish-and-chip shop door. People working in the mines on early shift used to be stood at the tram stop, and to shelter out of the rain they’d come up to the door and lean on the bell. That bell used to be going off at five o’clock in the morning.’ With his mother busy preparing the fish, Jack was often in the care of his grandmother, and it was she who regularly accompanied him to his first school. One day the pair came close to losing their lives. ‘Just outside our house there was the tram line. It was a single line with a loop where the trams could pass. We crossed over the road – this is what they told me later in life – and we nearly died. As we crossed the road this tram came round the loop rather too quickly and jumped the rails and ended coming towards us.’ When war was declared, Jack was seven years old, still too young to appreciate its full consequences. He remembers the coal store behind the house being replaced by an Anderson shelter, but the family soon decided that they could provide themselves with better and more comfortable protection. ‘The butcher’s shop had a cellar where they used to hang the meat because they did their own killing. The cows would be driven from Manchester straight into the stalls where they would be killed. Then they would hang the meat. Well, when war came, they turned this cellar into an air raid shelter.’ As far as Jack can recall, the nearest a German bomb came to Little Hulton was when the co-op at Kearsley was blown up; but Manchester was a more important target and, with plenty of false alarms, the three families would find themselves spending long hours huddled together in the cellar. ‘The guns would be blasting off and the next morning we would be out picking up the shrapnel.’ ‘They were happy days!’ Jack remembers. But for his father, working in the fire service in Liverpool, there were also moments of great danger that the young boy barely understood. ‘He was in Liverpool when the blitz was on and in the middle of the morning he was walking down the street and he saw something stuck up in the road and this chap said, “Don’t worry. It won’t go off for another twelve hours.” It was an unexploded bomb!’ * * * * * From a young age sport played a big part in Jack’s life. He had the ground of the Methodist Cricket Club, where his father played and ‘Don’t call him Little John’ 9