Thorpe: Man bricks dog

What I (vaguely) remember:

I was somewhere between 10 and 14 years old. We were living in a terraced house in one of the couple of small streets that made up a no-man's land called Thorpe, somewhere in between Leeds and Wakefield. Thorpe is one of those nothingly places you drive through to get to somewhere real. This was emphasized on a daily basis by the noise of the nearby M62. There were no shops (that I recall). The only thing of interest was the Chlorine plant directly across the road. There was literally nothing to do there, except walk the dog.

Now, the bit I should remember about this but can't be sure is the name of the dog in this tale of woe. We definitely had a very stupid red setter called Bonnie when we lived here, but he/she was taken away again at some stage by the original owner because we basically couldn't handle the constant cleaning up of sick, nicking food off the table and general insanity. On the other hand, it might have been my auntie's dog. Let's just call it "the dog" for the sake of argument.

Anyway, I was walking the dog, not on a lead or anything. I got to the end of our street and the dog ran into the very small yard in front of the last house. It probably started having a dump, can't exactly remember - it may have just been nosing around. The owner came out, picked up a bit stone that was next to the door. As I was shouting "No!!!" he threw it at the dog and hit one of its legs. The dog started screaming in pain. Don't remember much what happened next but it involved me crying and swearing at him a lot.

My mum took him to court over it. I had to get up in the witness box and tell the story. When I got to the swearing bit I said something like "then I said some rude things", which made some people in the court laugh. We won the case.

The ice cream men

We had 2 main ice cream vans (70s/early 80s - Belle Isle, Leeds)

1. Walls
The ice cream man was refered to as Wallsy, although this probably came from the brand of ice cream (?)
If I remember rightly he was a grumpy old man and had a really obvious wig that was the target of much piss-taking.
Typical ice cream van shape and product.

2. Basils
Weirder shaped van, sort of pointed and car shaped at the front, with a curvy overhanging bit on the roof. Lots of pink paint. Bit like a rocket lolly.
Don't remember the driver at all. 'Basil' used to sell those screwball things - a plastic inverted cone full of ice cream with an edible bubble gum ball in the bottom.

Billy Wells

He was the 'telly man'. Whenever it needed a new tube putting in (before tvs got cheap and disposable) Billy Wells would turn up. This almost certainly wasn't his real name because he had a foreign accent (Polish I think) and my grandad had supposedly vouched for him so that he could become a British citizen after the war. Apparently we got our telly fixed for free because of this.
He always seemed to be very tanned, so he must have made a bit of money out of it.
Black curly hair. Dazzling white teeth.
I always used to sit on the nearest armchair and watch him take the telly apart, fascinated. Wonder if this put him off?
Seemed like a really friendly guy anyway.