More Memories of a Birmingham childhood

That's me in the middle, my cousin George on the left, my cousin Richard on the right

Birmingham was a time I became more aware of relatives. With moving away from the Bolton areas where most of our relations lived, I’d missed out on much of the extended family where everyone got together for birthdays, Christmas, New Year, weddings and funerals, keeping up with each other’s doings. In those days, families tended to live close together, often in the same street, with aunts, uncles and cousins maybe in the next street. There was the disadvantage, of course, of not being able to do anything without the family knowing.

This lack of extended family was exacerbated by my having no grandparents or siblings (at least then.). Both grandfathers were killed within a month of each other during the Gallipoli Campaign. My maternal grandmother died in 1924; my paternal grandmother died in 1936, just before my parents met. I’ve always been saddened by the fact that I never knew my grandparents.

The rare visits of certain of our relatives are captured forever on film, tiny black and white pictures, now too fragile to scan. Our most frequent visitors were Auntie Mary, Uncle Syl and their family. Auntie Mary was Mum’s oldest sister by some five years and although they looked alike, particularly as both got older, that was the only resemblance. Mum was the live wire, the go-getter of the family while Auntie Mary was the home-maker, who’d married young and settled in the same place all her life with her family. She and Mum were very close. Certainly throughout my growing-up years, she was the one relation we saw the most of.

 

Then there was my cousin George, her son, a couple of years older than me, who terrorised my life with his teasing. He had a broad, flattened thumb, deformed as a result of an argument with a clothes mangle when he was little and he delighted in pushing it under my nose. 

Although there are no photographs to record it, one incident with cousin Sylvia, George’s older sister, sticks sharply in my mind. She came to Birmingham when she must have been in her late teens. Her visit coincided, as it may well have been designed to, with a large garden party which Mr Barclay was holding to celebrate the purchase of the new garden. It was such a large event with so many guests that Mum and Dad couldn’t cope on their own and extra staff had been hired to help.

One of them, an old soldier by the look of him, with bleary eyes and a bulbous nose, had been hired to organise the parking of the cars. Unfortunately, one of the hired waiters kept giving him glasses of the beer provided for the staff. The poor man became so drunk that every time he endeavoured to carry out his less than arduous duties, he fell over. He did this so many times that his nose was raw and bleeding from its contact with the drive and bits of gravel were embedded into it. In the end, he had be packed off home and someone else had to take over his duties.
 

 My cousin Sylvia was young, petite and pretty with startling blue Irish eyes, blonde hair and a flirtatious laugh (which she retained all her life). It was no wonder that she attracted the attention of one of the younger waiters. He plied Sylvia, who was helping out with the washing-up, with the remains of the champagne provided for the guests, liberally helping himself too. Some innate caution must have stopped Sylvia from having too much, though she was still tiddly but Roy, the waiter, was hopelessly and helplessly drunk. Eventually, he disappeared but everyone, including Sylvia, was too busy to bother about him just then. Even I helped, collecting glasses and taking them to where others were washing up. As the party was finishing and the clearing-up beginning, one of the older waiters came to the kitchen. ‘Ron, I’ve found Roy but I think you’d better come and take a look,’ he said. Being small, no one took any notice of me as I tagged on behind Mum, Dad, Sylvia and the older waiter. The sight greeting our eyes was not pleasant, nor easily forgotten. Roy had visited the toilet and obviously become ill while sitting there. Somehow, he had smeared his own faeces over the walls, the floor and the bowl itself. He was slouched, having passed out, against the wall and the floor. Somehow he’d managed to get his trousers up but they too were badly soiled as were his hands.

Mum, gagging at the sight and the smell, turned away. ‘I don’t care how you do it but get that lot cleaned up,’ she muttered. ‘I’m not going to do it and neither is Ron.’ Catching sight of me for the first time, she grabbed hold of my hand and dragged me away. I’ve been wary of the power of champagne since then. You’d think I’d have learned from that incident but I didn’t; I was once very ill after getting drunk on cheap Spanish champagne cocktails.

 Mum’s other sister, Annie, came to visit us in Birmingham, too, with her husband, Eddy Robinson and their son, Richard, a good few years older than me. Aunty Annie had missed out on the Morris good looks for she was tall and ungainly, with soft frizzy permed hair and red cheeks. She and Mum were more alike in temperament and sometimes had rows when they wouldn’t speak for ages.

 With typical childish intolerance, I never took much notice of Uncle Eddy. He was tall, with a bristly moustache, always with a pipe close at hand. He was also deaf, which made communication difficult. My cousin Richard was too grown up to be bothered with little Anne. He seemed very superior. He wasn’t, of course, he had a bit of a stutter and this made him shy. 

We also had a couple of visits from Dad’s brother, my Uncle Mark and his family. They always seemed to have the kind of lifestyle that spoke of riches to us, especially as they owned their own house in Sale, Cheshire. Auntie Lenora, his wife, always seemed posh, a bit condescending in her manner. I was a bit afraid of her sharp tongue although I later learned to appreciate that her scolding often covered up a deep concern. They had two daughters, Patricia and Pamela, both younger than me. For some reason, both sets of parents thought Patricia and I should be friends, being closer in age. It never worked then and we’re not in touch any more to find out if it ever would.

 

 Relations were about to become more important for we were on the move again. Although we always seemed, in the nostalgic recesses of my mind, to eat well, severe rationing was still in force. Mr Barclay was in the habit of ringing up at the last minute, having invited someone round to dinner. ‘There’ll be four of us for grub tonight, Millie,’ he’d say and she’d be left to find something substantial for dinner out of what was often lean pickings. Occasionally, there were pheasants or grouse from a shoot or chickens and eggs from a farmer friend but more often than not, Mr Barclay and his friends would end up with our rations while we ‘made do’. In the end, the strain and constant worry began to tell on Mum and they decided to leave, much to Mr Barclay’s regret. In 1949, we were to move back to Bolton, Lancashire, where Dad had been brought up.

Life in Post-war Birmingham - Part Two

 

           

Me in my patriotic red, white and blue dress

While we were living in Birmingham, I went to George Dixon Junior School, situated on the other side of Hagley Road, Edgbaston, which I had to cross twice daily. There were no lollipop men or women then and Hagley Road was, as I suppose it still is, one of the busiest roads in Birmingham. Neither was I escorted as today’s children are. We made our own to and from school. It was a typical Victorian school with classrooms leading off a large assembly hall. The only clear memory I have of the place was being rapped with a ruler over the knuckles by one of the more stern teachers for some misdemeanour I hadn’t done but took the blame for. Oh, and some sort of Victory celebration. All of us had to take portions of margarine, sugar and dried eggs from our rations to school, to be made up into buns. Mum made me a dress especially for the occasion, blue and white stripes with red piping. Very patriotic it was!

            For some reason I didn’t understand at the time, rationing was even more severe after the war and it continued long into the Fifties. It was only many years later that I learned it was because of the need to feed the starving Germans in the British Occupied Zone and the fact that our own country was virtually bankrupt after the war. Bread, which hadn’t been rationed during the war, was rationed afterwards for the same reason. I remember once being sent for our loaf ration to the bakers on Hagley Road. I wandered back, dawdling and day-dreaming as I was wont to do, while nibbling the crusty bits off the loaf. Mum was not pleased. Hardest of all for us children was the fact that sweets were also on ration with something like a miserly 2 ozs allowed per person per week. We used to make do with a mixture of cocoa and sugar into which we dipped a finger damp with spit. I discovered that if you put a touch of custard powder in, it gave the mixture a smoother taste and took away some of the bitterness of the cocoa.

            In January and February 1947, we experienced the coldest weather anyone could ever remember. The whole country was hit by power cuts and we lived our lives by candlelight and bathed in the regulation 4inches of water. The piercing and unrelieved cold was matched by the Cold War as Communism clamped unmercifully down in Europe. They were days of unremitting austerity when only the spivs grew rich on the black market and certain goods were available only under the counter. I tasted my first banana in 1947 when Mum managed to obtain some by just such means. I didn’t know what it was but it tasted delicious.

            Yet comparatively speaking, these were fortunate days for the Williams family for we often dined on Mr Barclay’s left-overs. Before I was 8, I had developed a taste for smoked salmon which I have never lost, though I never did like oysters or caviar. Most people were making do on a miserly 8d of meat per week, a scrape of margarine, and dried eggs, still very much the staple diet. There were dozens of different ways to serve them, thanks to the plentiful, ‘Tips for Healthy Eating’ from the Ministry of Food. Or was it the Ministry of Health?

            Although petrol was also rationed, Mr Barclay was allocated extra because of his disability and let Dad have the use of the car occasionally. Mum and Dad were allowed one day off a week, usually a Thursday, and they used to meet me from school, take me into town to have some tea at a café somewhere. Then we’d go on to either the cinema or the theatre. My love of both was born out these very special treats although my first real experience of the cinema terrified me. We’d gone to see Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and I cried so much when the Wicked Witch of the West came on that my parents had to take out of the cinema. Yet on another occasion, when we’d been to see Judy Holliday in ‘Stand Up As She Goes,’ I loved it so much, I didn’t want to leave and remember standing in the darkened aisle begging to be allowed to see it again.

            There was the time, too, when we went to the theatre to see Michael Miles in some quiz show. Very often on these trips out, we’d take a theatre box. It felt rather splendid and regal to be seated in a box overlooking the stage, especially when Michael Miles drew attention to the little girl in the rose-patterned dress. He wanted me to go down to the stage but I couldn’t. I had my ankle in plaster and was using crutches. For once though, it was nice to be the centre of attention, with a spotlight on me and people in the audience clapping because Michael Miles had elicited their sympathy.

            Birmingham city centre had suffered considerable bomb damage and we grew used to seeing bomb sites softened by masses of rose bay willow herb and ragwort. The damage was nothing compared to that of Birmingham’s neighbour, Coventry, which we saw on one of our trips out. Mum and Dad were very quiet, I remember, probably at the sight of such whole scale destruction. It is the old Cathedral which sticks in my mind, its burnt timbers thrusting starkly to the sky, the piles of fallen centuries-old masonry, a brave testament to time. More poignant than this was the lunchtime service, crowded with people standing amid the ruins singing a hymn to the glory of God.

            The memories weren’t always happy ones as my father was nearly killed in a road accident while we were in Birmingham. He’d been driving along a main road when someone came out of a side road without stopping, hitting Dad square and practically demolishing the small Vauxhall. Fortunately, he was unhurt but I remember us going to the hospital some time after for him to have a check-up. Mum and I sat in the big Humber outside listening to the broadcast of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Philip Mountbatten in November 1947.

            There was much more reverence for the Royal Family then. Almost every public building had a picture of the King on their walls. We followed their doings as avidly as today’s youngsters follow those of so-called celebrities. Like many of my contemporaries, I had a thick scrapbook of all their photographs and I can clearly remember including a detailed drawing of the Princess’s wedding dress. I still had the scrapbook many years later, despite our many moves around the country.