My name is Steve Jarvis, born here in 1953 and I'm 72 now.
So I was born in the flats before we moved down onto Newman Road. When I was, I don't know how old I was when we moved down there. I can't remember that bit but that was, they were all new then, they'd only just been built, so we had a new house. So the flats that have only just been built, but because I have a twin sister, I think we were too big a family to stay in the flat, two bedrooms. Then we moved straight down to Newman Road, which is in the middle of the top estate.
Top estate, you know that, don't you? The top estate is all council- the houses were built by the council. These like pre-fab types, concrete slab houses and then the bottom estate was built a bit later when the pit got on properly underway and the cold board built those, o we just, everybody in the really top estate, bottom estate […] they have other names, Geordie estate and things like that, but it was alway top estate bottom estate. “Where do you live? I live at top estate"
Yeah, so the sort of the miners, a lot of Geordie's moved into there […] came down from Newcastle way.
And is that how your family came to be in Calverton?
They came from Sheffield, rather of Sheffield. My grandparents moved down as well, so the whole family was down here. And so my granddad and my dad both went to the pit. Having … I think my granddad worked in a pit in Sheffield, near Sheffield, but me dad worked on the railway I think and then he just came down to work at the pit and there was at housing, new housing, if they came down here, so I guess they thought that was the place to be.
Me dad used to bring home, for the school holidays, that's when they had their two weeks off and the miners all brought home all the kit in the sack. Just a normal proper sack and he'd bring all his gear home. So his helmet and his lamp and all the things that they wore, I mean, they're disgusting things because they didn't have a bother to wash them or anything, but it's things like shorts and you know, scruffy t-shirts and things that were all- I just remember this sack, cos he used to get his hat out and wear his hat, his helmet. I got all the gear from my granddad, some from my dad. And when we do the 40s events, we go around the place doing 40s events, I always dress up as a minor, so hats are made out of cardboard. They're a bit shiny, so you think oh, they maybe plastic. Uh uh, that's the sort of thing they were, they were forever coming home with, you know, sort of scarred and bits of coal. Whenever you've got a cut, it always got coal dust up in it, so they ended up black. Every cut you see from a miner, on the back or wherever. So it was black, full of coal.
I know Trisha always says she used to spend hours going, sitting behind her dad and picking out bits of coal because, you know, laying on your back and, you know, you're covered in coal. She says, "You know, you're going to spend ages picking bits of coal out me dad's back." Yeah, I just remember that. That's one of the main things. I just remember coming home with these bag of weeks holidays.
Cos at school, all the other people's dads were miner, not all of them, but most of them were miners in them days.
Can I ask you what your earliest memory is of Calverton?
I just, just snippets of um, I can remember coming down here, just sort of from literally over there, because this at the time was a row of houses and shops, so this car park wasn't here at all. That's the front, I don't know why I remember that, but I remember seeing it from inside a car. So we drove down here and the butchers was there on the side of the road a really old house.
But my parents, when they came down -I'll just go back again because you just triggered my memory. Do you know the petrol station? Just over there. So my grandparents lived in a caravan at the back of the garage, Wrights garage, and that's when they first came down. So they were in there before they moved into a flat because they knew from that they new Maggie Wright and Charlie Wright who ran it, and so in fact my grandparents even went dancing with them. So yeah, so that's where they just remember that.
But my dad also lodged with somebody […] because they hadn't got married then. My mum and dad was the first of the new villages to get married in this church. There were obviously people from the old village, but they were the first of the new influx to get married in that church. Yeah, that's right, they were. Yeah, chatting … these things come back.
What do you remember from your childhood?
Well, I just remember being walked down because my first school would have been Manor Park, which again is in that boundary over there. And I do remember being walked down to the school by my mother and my mother standing outside the gate. And I'm not sure if that road was actually a road then. I think it might have been a track. Certainly the road at the other side was just a track. There was no road at part road east didn't. There was a bit down the bottom and a bit at the top, but it was a band in the middle that was just a footpath through.
So I remember all those things … playing and doing … I mean, I remember when they were building the house at the bottom here at night, as kids we just went climbing on the scaffolding down there, you know, with a group of friends that lived down there all.
We were forever in the woods, so Oxton woods was our place at night. That's probably a little bit later on. So I would have been eight, nine. I certainly remember, so I'd be, I'm guessing around about five or six when I would remember me, my mam walking us down to the, to the, to the infant school. And then I remember the, some other school visually quite well. And so then I went on to Sherbrooke school, which is at the far end, with the same people. It's all the same group of people. So you knew em, you'd just be split by the different classes.
Yeah, I remember, I remember all that to quite vividly and where we lived, you know, everybody knew everybody up down the streets. We just played football on the road, because there's very few cars about. So you'd just put a couple of shirts down and play football on the road. Get the occasional kick of a ball over somebody's hedge, but manage to sneak in and get it somewhere.
So yeah, all the playing was done within that, that area, which they've since it's been built on it, which were little green area's in the middle, they've sort of built on most of it. Where we would have played hide and seek and tin-can lurgy or whatever it was then, a lot of them just don't exist anymore.
So when you think about your childhood, and you think about play, it was all outside?
Oh blimey, you couldn't wait, as soon as you go home from school, it was right. I'll get some tea quick and then off you go, right, “you want me in what time? Nine o'clock, okay, nine o'clock. Yeah, okay, I've got me watch.” And then of course you realize you're late and so you change your watch a little bit and say, "Well my watch says, "Yeah, all right."
Yeah, you literally went out so just as soon as you did some tea, you couldn't wait to go and find somebody or you'd have arrange something at school oh I'll see you at the green at so and so. Or, I've Occo woods. This was Oxton, Oxton woods was all Occo woods … play hide and seek or climb trees, I think that was the biggie. But there was a stream going through there, so you'd spend all the time damming the stream … you could never do it because there was far too much water but you'd have a go and damming it with some things and yeah, you'd even go further up on to what they call seven lakes which is much further up. You could go for a long way up there, even if you weren't supposed to.
But playing down here as well on the big playing field at the bottom there, the main playing field.
[I] remember climbing over a fence, so the green area just up there at the side of Navara Cour. At the back of where the old vicarage was … I remember when they were building that as well. But no I do remember climbing, there was a fence there, they'd fenced it off and I do remember a chain link fence … climbing up and over it. None of us had seen you but there's two coppers walking up infant of. “Oh, really sorry officer. Shouldn't have done that, should we? And you know, it was all very, there was no, you know, having a go at them, I'm really, really sorry. ”Go on then, you should know better, get on your way."
I do remember that. And of course when they were building the, the miners welfare that was there, which replaced the, the old vicarage, the guys that were like in the tractor in the JCBs at the back for what they were then. You could kind of ride, and they put you in the bucket at the front actually in the bucket and lift you up. They had a big mound of soil that they dug out when they did the foundation, really big and then they sort of picked you up at the bottom and then lift you up to the top and put you on the top. So yeah, that was a, that was a regular thing to do.
Well, they're looking for the ghost when they knocked it down where they're supposed to be. This is haunted, you know. I said we were there looking for the ghost in the vicarage. I suppose it's quite a normal childhood.
I don't think it's been changed that long because I know our kids did [play outside]. I mean, Colin's, our eldest is 50, 51, 52 and so he was out all, they were all, because it's four boys and so it's not girls but yeah, they were out most of the time. It was very, very early days of, you know, as computers had gone.
And of course there were girls involved in that. So not, not to how it is now, to our, our grandchildren - no different beast. They've seen to be happy just, that's different. No right or wrong, it's just different. Just feel like not being out in the fresh air with you friends as opposed to just, you know, Facebook and more whatever they want to do. I just don't think you get the same interaction with somebody.
But hey, but we have to drag the kids, the grandkids should have said, oh do we have to, well we'll go down to the stream and you can throw a few stones in the stream. You know, do I have to put this down? Yeah, put it down. Let's go.
We do take them out in the caravan quite a bit, when we can. And just trying to drag him away from them, little screens. They normally say, oh that was good, I enjoyed that.
We used to play here as well, you know, yeah, all the trees, yeah, they go climbing trees, say you know, I've already been up that one several times, don't you? And yeah, [they] don't always take a lot of notice, but it's nice to be able to relay the messages, try and tell them the layout of the village as it was as well. And sometimes they're interested, sometimes not …
There's a hillside and we always knew it was Monksters, and that's where we always went sledging in the winter, because don't forget, the winters when we were small, every year you had snow several times for extended periods. So we'd just be up sledging up there for, as soon as you got home from school, again, straight down, socks for gloveses and get off up there with your sledge.
So that was somewhere else everybody got together with all just groups of kids, all the heating was busted. So you always got used to this having a warm front and a cold back or ice on the inside of the windows as well, ice on the inside … till the central heating came, but coal central heating started. I don't know when I remember me dad putting our central heating in. But up till then I remember lighting fires … I had a paper round of course, that's the other thing, paper rounds…
So I'd be up and going out to paper and then me said, now when you go kguht a fire, that's what I would do.
And how old were you then?
I'm guessing. So my mom always used to shout me, “be careful” uhm, very early teens when I first started. Could have been 11, I think it was probably an age you were allowed to do it. I can't remember what that was, but it was quite young. you were I had to go over to Woodborough actually, it was a bit of a funny round. So I did a few down here I think and then over the hill to Woodborough and deliver a few there, which was a pain. It was like the one you were given when you first started. Everybody then said, well, when soon as another one, I don't want this one, I want to move on to that one. Yeah, when so-and so was leaving, you know, so I want that one.
Sunday was always separate. So you got paid separately for Sundays because they were really heavy newspapers. And just opposite, you don't know, Minters the Printers here. So if you just go up here a little way, all the old houses on the left hand side, it's just a row of terraces and the letter boxes were vertical. And I always delivered to this house and every Sunday morning there'd be a sweet in the bottom of the letter box for me. There's me sweet right, I am putting this thing in. That was every week. Yeah […] just something else I remember.
Tell me about your late teenage and early adulthood in Calverton.
Well, it certainly changed in, you know, we could buy a house from the council, not for a whole lot of money. That made a massive, massive change to the village of ownership of property. So we, we were renting a, actually the same flats that my parents lived in. We had out first, we got a baby ride then, as well we lived with her parents, not in Calverton, but only just a few miles away. But then we came back, we couldn't stand it there. But it was far better here for getting into Nottingham. So we were back here in with my parents and then we could claim that we were overcrowded, and which we were actually. And so you can go and see the council and knock on his door and say, look, there's a, there's a flat to get empty up so and so, and he'd go on sort, he'd sort it out for you, he'd get the flat.
So we had a flat and then she was terrible. She used to be knocking on the doors all the time. "There's a house! Yeah, well you can't have them. There's a house." And so she managed to get us the house around on Lee Road, [..] bedroomed semi. But that was the first one we bought. So we'd pay four thousand five hundred.
Oh, how old would I have been? Maybe twenty five at the latest, probably earlier than that. So that was our first one for four thousand. I was doing an apprenticeship so I was earning proper money [...]
What was that in? Your apprenticeship?
I worked at the Arms factory and it's where I worked all me life. So I started there when I was 16 and left when I was 56. It was fantastic. So in Nottingham you have big manufacturers. So you got the Royal Ordnance factory which are about the John Players, Rally, Boots, Rolls Royce, all of these big factories. When I started work, it wasn't really a matter of can I get a job? It was who do I want to go and work with? I decided that one day that I think I'd like to. I want to be an engineer in any way and go to the Royal Ordnance factory. So I did, put a little exam to get in there. It wasn't too difficult. 40 apprentices a year they took on. So I was one of the 40 that went. But that was at 16. So we'd already met, we met soon after that. And we got married on my 19th birthday.
And so how many years have you been together then?
53 now. 55 years. Because I got this job […] we got married on my 19th birthday, we had our first son following May. Because I got a job, I got a scooter, a really cheap one. And then they said one day, “Right, you can have a decent scooter then.” So I had a Lambretty scooter. So that was where I met Trish. Because then I could travel around the villages.
The other thing, that's the other thing. The youth club. So the youth club which a lot of people went to. And so that's what you did. And the youth club is between right outside of the main school. So yeah, lots of people went to the youth club then. So that's where that's the other thing. So when you got that bit old, though, you were in your teens, then the youth club became a bit, “oh yeah, Some girls… play table tennis”