My
life has undergone many changes but by far the most significant came when I was
13 and we moved back to Horwich. Mum had been born and brought up there and
still had lots of family and friends. Before moving into domestic service, Mum
had worked as a towel weaver so she went back there part-time. Within
a few weeks, she was persuaded to organise to celebrate the upcoming Coronation of Elizabeth II. She and some friends got together to draw up a
programme and the hard work began, planning, deciding who was to do what, what
kind of costumes were going to be worn, being involved in the actual sewing of
them.
As for the concert itself, who
could forget tall, ungainly Mona, dressed as a ballet dancer, singing, ‘Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty,’ or Mum and a busty woman called Kathleen
singing ‘We Are The Bold Gendarmes,’ or Mum later doing her standard
impersonation of Carmen Miranda. Even I sang, in the chorus, dressed as a toy
soldier while a tackler from the mill sang, ‘Goodbye,’ about a young man joining
the Foreign Legion.
After the concert, my mother
seemed different. It must have been a week or two later that she
told me that she was going to have a baby. Surely, at 42, she was too old to have a baby? Suppose
she died like I’d heard some women did.
Our flat had only
two bedrooms and was on the first floor so Mum and Dad began to look at the
possibility of getting a larger house. After asking around her friends in the
mill, she heard of a couple who had no children but had a three-bedroomed house. After the pokiness of our flat, the
house seemed enormous and very tempting but there was a big drawback. The rent
was 42/- a week (about £2.10p) which was almost double that of the
flat and as Mum would have to give up work, they didn’t know if they could
afford it. Yet now, it seems a paltry sum but back then, wages were much lower.
The bathroom was so cold that we
only took a bath once a week on Sunday, when Dad took a paraffin heater up
there. In the mornings, with your breath misting in front of you, you had just
a quick ‘cat-lick’ and got dressed as quickly as possible. At least we had a
bathroom and didn’t have to resort to using a tin bath in front of the fire as
so many people still did.
The bedrooms were almost as bad
for although there was a small fireplace in each of the two big bedrooms, we
could not afford the coal for them, except when anyone was ill, when Dad carried hot coals carefully on a shovel. We had no fitted wardrobes either,
just big old-fashioned wardrobes bought second-hand. There was a rug by the
side of the bed on bare floorboards to begin with, later on linoleum.
Downstairs, we had new-fangled asphalt tiles which we kept polished, with a
large square carpet rug in the middle.
Moving to a new area meant
making new friends, something I’d never found easy. Someone Mum knew from the
mill had a foster daughter the same age as me who knew hardly anyone in
Horwich and the two of us were introduced. She was small and pretty with
well-endowed breasts. I still had none to speak of.
Ada and her foster family lived in a terraced house. The rear of the houses
had small gardens rather than back yards and these, together with the alley in
between, made a marvellous play area. With the selfishness of the very young
and oblivious to the fact that my poor mother suffered from sickness all the
way through her pregnancy, I spent almost all my time there in the spring and
summer of 1953.
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| Harry on the right |
That must have been about May 1953
when preparations for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II were at fever pitch.
There was a tremendous feeling of excitement in the country that year, despite
the fact that the so-regal Queen Mary, the Queen’s grandmother, had died only a
couple of months before. We were all fierce royalists at that time and followed
the Royal Family’s doing avidly. There was so much about them in the papers,
much like the celebrities are these days, showing informal glimpses of the
Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, with a young Prince Charles and Princess Anne.
The Coronation took place on 2nd
June 1953 and it was televised for the first time which meant that we could
actually see it happening rather than watching it on the Pathé Newsreel at the
cinema a week or so later. Those who could asked friends, relatives and
neighbours round to watch it. Mum’s sister, Mary, had obtained a set for the
occasion, probably rented from Radio Rentals, and we went to watch it at their
house. It seems laughable now that a dozen or so people clustered round a tall
wooden box housing a 9” television screen. The pictures were fuzzy, the
commentary hackneyed but the sheer excitement of the occasion outweighed such
minor drawbacks. Everyone ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ and toasted the young queen in
bottled pale ale and ham sandwiches.
At night I was to attend a
Coronation party with Harry, Ada and Brian. Mum had made me a white dress for my
confirmation at earlier that year and she had dyed it yellow for the ‘do’ which
was to be held in a private function room at a local pub. The dress had a simple fitted bodice to show off what little bust I had
and a full flared skirt. The black bow at the collar and a black belt at the
waist made me feel very grown-up. I was so dizzy with the excitement of the
whole day that I don’t recall much of the party. I do remember doing a novelty
dance with Harry where I had to wear his new brown sports jacket and clomp
around the dance floor in his shoes. I don’t think he took much notice of me
other than that.
In the July Wakes Weeks when the
mills and factories closed, I went away for a week’s holiday with Ada and her
foster family to Blackpool. I hadn’t really wanted to leave Mum, who was by
then was in a constant state of discomfort but, as she said, the baby wasn’t
due for a week or two. I’d never been away from my parents before and it was a
strange experience for me. Brian and Harry came over to spend a day with us but
Harry seemed a bit half-hearted about it and didn’t want to kiss me. I sensed
rather than was told that our brief romance was at an end.
Within a few weeks of the holiday
in Blackpool, two events occurred which marked the end of my childhood. The
first was starting my periods. At fourteen and a half, I was one of the last
girls in our class at school to have had a period. Although I’d been well
prepared for it by Mum, it was still a shock.
Money was so tight then that both Mum and I used to cut up old towels which
were attached with safety pins to our knickers. There was nearly always a
bucket of stained towels soaking in cold water and salt in the scullery which
were later washed and used again. It wasn’t until
I was working that we could afford proper sanitary towels.
The second event was the birth of
my brother, Mark. Mum was two weeks overdue and had to go into hospital to be
induced. At that time, only fathers were allowed to visit the new mums and I
didn’t see my new brother until Dad and I went to the hospital to pick Mum up
after his birth. In the taxi back, I sat with him in my arms, looking down at
his little face, scarcely able to believe it. Circumstances meant that I had to take my duties as big sister seriously over the next
month. (To be continued.)
