Chicken's Feet

As we get on in life it's mair aboot Crow's feet, but back in day it was all aboot these wee beauties.

Up Causewayside near Braid Place there was a poultry butcher, which was more of a "making stuff for other butchers" butcher, than yer "go in and buy mince" type butcher. No awfy sure what the boy got up tae in there but he used to have binloads of sawdust covered animal bits ootside.

On the way to school we would often have a quick rummage through his buckets to see if there was any good stuff.

The jewel in the crown were chicken's feet. I think some of them might even have been turkey feet cos they were a fair size. They were yellow gnarly things wi nails and wrinkles. Best bit though was the tendons.

You could get a grip of the tendons where the foot had been chopped and pull them to work the toes. If you had a full set of intact tendons, you had hit paydirt and had a proper working alien hand that would move at your command.

What use is a fully functioning chicken hand? To a '70's bairn the list was endless. Everything from grabbing folks necks in assembly to giving the finger to passing car drivers. A personal favourite was bringing yer money out yer pocket to pay for stuff in shops with a hideous claw. How we laughed..

One drawback is that they went off pretty quick when stored in yer pocket on a summers day. But that was awright cos you just went back the next day and raked aboot for a fresh one.

The marketing tagline could have been...
Chicken's feet ©. The more portable "Armatron" alternative for the less well off "High Wall" bairn who's always on the move.


(click to enlarge)

Standard equipment #2

This was the ultimate insect killer. Purloined from the lock-up of a painter and decorator this paraffin fuelled blow lamp was the best flame thrower you could find. Made of brass and weighing in at around 2 kilos this thing was nearly indestructible. Used mainly in action around the high wall, many insects and plastic models fell prey to its hot kiss. Quite surprising is that no one was injured during operations. This blow lamp replaced the small plastic squeezy bottles which were previously used for such purposes.

Standard equipment

These were the matches of choice when we were kids. No lighters in those days. A constant supply of matches was necessary for lighting the workies lamp or candles, for starting fires, for lighting fags and last but not least for making a tank. A tank was usually called for when we got bored or when taking the matches home was too dangerous. To make a tank you opened the match box slightly at the end where the heads of the matches were.One match was tken out, struck and stuck flame first into the other match heads. The resulting conflagration was supposed to resemble a burning tank. Good stuff. A strong smell of sulphur and a lot of smoke , just what the doctor ordered! Short lived but still bloody good fun.

Workie's lamps

Following on from previous comments here is the "workies lamp" of our youth compared with it's hi-tec counterpart of these days.

No real comparison. Stingy eyes and black reek and just enough light to read an H&E, wrestling mag or horror comic.

These things were freely available in the area around the High Wall. Cheap and efficient with a handy hanging hook.

Just the job for a poorly ventilated gangie strewn with old bits of paper. They are known as "paraffin hazard lamps" Don't know why, they seemed perfectly safe to us.

Try lighting a cinnamon stick with one of the new fangled ones. I rest my case.