Grandad's Whistle

When my grandad died at Easter in 1968, I was handed his very old Acme Thunderer whistle, along with the message that "Grandad would have wanted you to have it". I was thrilled to bits. From that time onwards, I was 'the kid with the whistle' down our street, which very quickly opened some doors for me in a strange way.

No, this is not going to be a "Billy's Boots" type of story, although by saying that I have just come up with a brilliant idea for a short story. Blimey, I surprise myself sometimes! Anyway, back to what I was saying. This is a true story of how I used that whistle before I lent it to my mum to use for her Brown Owl duties and before she promptly gave it away without realising the sentimental significance of it to me and, of how it sort of paved my way following an injury after a freak accident that ended my footballing days. 

Try, if you can, to imagine me as a 12-year-old schoolboy. Yes, I was young once. Saddened by the sudden death of my grandad, my eyes lit up when I was handed a little gold coloured (probably brass) thing that rattled. I quickly worked out that it was a whistle with a very boisterous pea inside it. I blew it a few times indoors and nearly burst the eardrums of everyone in our living room. I was as happy as a pig in mud.

Ironically, when you consider what the eventual fate of that whistle was, my mum told me never to lend it to anyone. I didn't realise at the time that what she actually meant was not to lend it to anyone except to her.

For the next few years, based solely on the fact that I now owned a whistle, I was called upon on Sundays to referee schoolboy-level matches at Poverest Recreation Ground, which was very near where we lived at the time. Most of the games were between 'street teams', for instance Lincoln Green Road would play Archer Road and so on. Important games to the kids playing but very little interest to anybody else. They even had their own league set up. That worked well until the Subbuteo game came along and literally took the place of the local Rec games virtually overnight.

But those street games could only be played one at a time as there was only one spare pitch at the Rec that could be used; the other pitches always had 'proper' games in action. So my job as 'referee' wasn't filled with fixture congestions or double-bookings. Grandad's whistle was still overworked, though, and the more games I refereed the better I seemed to get.

However, after the advent of Subbuteo, I went back to kicking my heels as most of the kids went indoors to play in a table top football league instead. My mum became Brown Owl at the local Brownies and, she promptly borrowed my cherished whistle, to blow when the Brownies got a bit unruly. The catastrophe came when she handed the Brown Owl job and all that it entailed over to a younger person — and the whistle went with it!

I was a bit devastated and I wasn't cheered up much when, after relaying the story to a relative, they turned round and said "Neither a borrower nor a lender be". That really gave me the hump, not least because I felt that somebody should have told me this before I parted ways with grandad's whistle.

Yet that whistle had taken me on a journey that I was to repeat about 10 years after my grandad's demise. A freak accident at Rectory Lane (yes, the Wands' would-be new home in Foots Cray that never happened) one Saturday morning in February 1978, in which a very heavy kerbstone landed on my right foot, put paid to the effectiveness of me being able to kick a football with that foot ever again. And then I thought back over the years to those local Rec games and how I'd enjoyed refereeing them. So I promptly signed up for a referees' course in Bromley. After several weeks of the course, I took my exam in Dartford and sailed through it. I had become a qualified football referee — and I put it all down to being handed my grandad's whistle all those years before.

I went on to referee many park matches, received lots of abuse from players and from spectators standing along the touchlines, booked loads of persistent offenders, sent quite a number off (including a copper in Essex who thought he was immune), almost gave up the job twice following attempted physical attacks on me in the changing rooms, and I ran the line for a couple of seasons in the London Spartan League. But I would never exchange those experiences for anything else in the world.

I now have an Acme Thunderer whistle of my own that I purchased after I passed the referee's exam. It sits in a nice little metal box alongside my old notebook holder complete with red and yellow cards. Even the 2p piece I used for the toss-ups is still in that box as well. Maybe one day those pieces will see the light of day and used once more by one of my younger relatives but, my own refereeing days are well and truly over.

And none of this would have happened, I am sure, without my grandad's Acme Thunderer whistle coming into my life at such a young age.