“You’re Mary must be about ready to drop,” Joe trotted to his side and tried to match his lolling gait with short muscular legs. .
With eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead, Charlie grunted again. Joe dropped his gaze to his worn boots and marched silently alongside the tall, ropey figure.
The two men walked on passing rows of blackened terrace houses and three storey boarding houses facing each other across the wide cobbled road, each blank eyed window giving no clue to the squalor within. Lost in thought, neither man acknowledged the haggard gaze of women in threadbare aprons, or the joyful squeals of children with limbs seemingly too fragile to hold them aloft as they swung round the tall iron gas lamps.
Half way down the street the pavement ended abruptly and turned into a cul-de-sac surrounded on both sides by windows intermittently breaking the monotony of high brickwork. Charlie paused on the pavements edge at the sound of a tin can striking the cobblestone road closed in by the high wall of a disused building beyond which lay the knackers yard on one side and the Sheaf Saw Mill on the other. Their calls adding to the distant screech of wood saws, a group of boys were racing up and down, grabbing threadbare coats and pulling opponents down in the playful fight to win the game. For a moment Charlie saw himself among them, thin, muddied and ecstatically determined to make the slippery streets his football pitch, the battered can his football. In his mind the street vanished to be replaced by the expanse of green of the Wednesday’s pitch surrounded by a sea of faces, waving arms and a wall of sound as he trotted out onto the field of dreams.