Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

9 Finding a small enough bat time the young boy was visiting the smithy, but Mike still recalls how the hand-operated bellows fired up the coke forge until the strip of metal was red hot, how the blacksmith hammered out the horseshoe on his anvil and how the steam rose as he then dipped it into water. After all this it was ready for shoeing the shires – the working horses on which farmers relied before they could afford tractors. ‘No health and safety then,’ Mike says with a wry smile. The home in which Mike spent his childhood had been in the family for many years. One of a pair of cottages abutting the blacksmith’s shop, this was where Tom Bird and his wife Helen had raised their eight children. After Helen’s death Tom had lived on with four of his five daughters. Muriel was to be the only one of those four to marry and, when she did so, Maurice also moved into the cottage. After their father’s death in 1934, the three sisters continued to live with the young married couple and their child. Nor did Muriel’s other siblings show any urge to leave Broughton Astley. One brother died young, but her only married sister lived in a house built at the end of her father’s field that ran down to the blacksmith’s shop; and when a younger brother married just before the war, he built his home next door to hers. As neither of these couples had children, Mike spent his early years surrounded by aunts and uncles, but his only cousins were the four children of Muriel’s older brother Bill, whose family lived at the other end of the village. Meanwhile the tenants of the adjoining cottage had two boys just a little older than Mike, the younger of whom became a close friend. With the birth of a brother Roger, nine years Mike’s junior, soon to be followed by a sister Judy, the three spinster aunts all moved out to live with their married sister. Some years later, what remained of the field and the orchard that went with the cottages was sold for development, but one plot was retained on which Judy built a bungalow when she married. When she and her family moved to a neighbouring village, it provided Mike’s parents with an easily manageable home for their retirement. The modest bungalow where Muriel lived, first with Maurice, then after his death with her youngest sister, is now home to the widowed Mike. Maurice Knight Smith, Mike’s father, was an only child born in 1909 and brought up in the nearby village of Narborough. Maurice’s father, Charles Knight Smith, born at Blaby in 1878, was a manager for Empire Stone, a company which was still trading until 1994. The dominant employer in Narborough with 650 on the staff in its pomp, Empire Stone specialised in the manufacture of