Doing the Lambeth Walk

Mum on the right with her friend doing the Lambeth Walk

It occurred to me recently that although I’ve blogged about my dear old Dad and his soldiering days, I haven’t talked about my lovely Mum, Emily (and known fondly as Em). She was born in Horwich, near Bolton, in 1911, the youngest of three sisters. She also had an older and two younger brothers. Life was very hard for my grandmother, also an Emily, because my grandfather, as a private in the 1^st Battalion of the ‘Six VCs before breakfast’ Lancashire Fusiliers, had died during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. At 39, with a young family, he would not have had to go to war except that he was a reservist, having served with the Lancashire Fusiliers previously between 1894 and 1899.

              Mary Ellen, her mother’s sister, lived with them, off and on, sleeping on the sofa because there was no bed to spare. As she was lame and unable to work, she helped out where she could. Labelled ‘an interfering old bugger’ by my Auntie Mary, she was nevertheless a great influence on my mother’s life. She loved to sing and taught Mum many of the songs she knew, not all of them respectable. Mum got into trouble once at a tea party for war orphans for singing one of Auntie Mary Ellen’s songs, about a young woman who pretended to be a soldier in order to stay with her soldier sweetheart. It was the phrase, ‘her lily white breasts,’ which earned her a telling-off from the good ladies of the Co-operative Guild. She also had a suitable saying for every occasion and these have passed down through Mum until they have become family mottos. Sayings like ‘It’s a long lane that has no turning,’ and ‘As one door closes, another opens,’ have been held on to over and over again when things were going badly. I was later to find, through doing my family history, that she died, aged only 52, in Fishpool Workhouse in Bolton, Lancashire

              When Mum was 11, she passed a scholarship to go to local grammar school. The school was Protestant and Mum’s family were Catholics but her mother, aware of the advantages of education, insisted she go. Mum remembered that she wasn’t allowed to go into the morning assembly with the others, but apart from that, she really enjoyed school and seemed to do well there. Unfortunately, when she was 13, her mother fell gravely ill and as she lay dying, the priest refused her the last rites unless ‘that child leaves that Protestant grammar school.’ Under intense pressure, and knowing what it would mean to her mother to have the last rites, she agreed, though it was to turn her against Catholicism. She never forgave that priest.

The then equivalent of Social Services wanted to split the family up and foster the children separately but Mary, the elder sister, and John, the elder brother, themselves only 19 and 18 (they were both born in the same year, 1905) would not hear of it. Mary used to come home in her dinner break from the mill where she worked, to give the younger children their dinner.

When Mum left school at fourteen, she went in 't'mill' like her sisters Mary and Annie but never liked it. By sixteen, she was working 'in service' and stayed in that line of work for most of her working life. In 1936, she met my Dad, Ronald, and within a year they were married. Both of them worked, on and off, in domestic service for most of my childhood and afterwards.

She always said that it was Dad who had itchy feet but it was actually her that kept looking in ‘The Lady’ magazine for other domestic service jobs. One interview they went to was with John Stonehouse, one time MP, who, shortly after, faked his own death by drowning and turned up in Australia living with his secretary. Another interview was with Victor Lowndes, the European head of the Playboy organisation. They turned him down because he refused to consider changing the original Victorian kitchen of his country house, Stocks.

In about 1972/73, they went to work for an up and coming business man, Asil Nadir, who had a rather grand house on Bishop's Avenue, otherwise known as Millionaire's Row, Hampstead, London. They had some hilarious adventures there, including bundling Asil's mistress out of the back door while his wife came in the front. In 1993, while on bail on fraud charges relating to his Polly Peck organisation, he fled the country to live in Turkish Cyprus. In 2010, he returned to the UK, the case went to trial and he is now serving a prison sentence.

After officially retiring from domestic service, Emily became manager of a charity shop, first of all in Bedford, then, after they’d moved back to Lancashire, in Bolton. Even when she retired from that, she kept busy fund-raising for various charities and organising a bingo social club in Bolton two or three days a week. In the early 1980s, when she was in her seventies, she and a friend entered a national competition being held to promote the West End opening of ‘Me and My Girl’ starring Robert Lindsay and Emma Thompson. Their portrayal of the Lambeth Walk led to them winning the regional final and then, against stiff competition from Londoners themselves, they won the national final!

Mum in later life with that smile!

After my Dad died in 1999, Mum continued to live alone in their flat in Horwich but in 2001, moved to Bolsover, Derbyshire to be nearer me and my husband. She lived in sheltered accommodation, making friends easily and participating in most of the events. I visited most afternoons and on Sundays, she would come to us for lunch. In 2008, after a series of stays in hospital, she moved into a care home as she needed more daily care than I was able to provide. She died in December 2008, following a short illness aged 97. All who came into contact with her declared her to be ‘a lovely lady’ with a big and generous heart and, as someone said, ‘a captivating smile.’ I’m so proud that she was my Mum.

Memories of my soldier Dad

My parents at the 75th Gallipoli anniversary 1990

While watching the television coverage of the 70^th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings on Friday, 6^th June, memories of my dear Dad came flooding back. He was such a lovely man that I feel his life is worthy of a more than just a quick mention.

            He was born in November 1911 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, where his father had been working for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company. The family returned to Bolton in Lancashire, where his mother’s family lived, shortly after. His father died of wounds in the Gallipoli Campaign in June 1915 following the Battle of Krithia. His mother obtained a live-in job as a caretaker where she also served as a post-lady during the war.  Dad said he wasn’t especially clever at school but he was one of the most knowledgeable people I know. He was also a brilliant artist in pencil or pen and ink although his talent was restricted to copying photographs and other drawings.

            By the time he was 15, he was driving a motor cycle and, at 17, was an experienced car driver. There were no driving tests; he always said, ‘You just sort of picked it up as you went along.’ He remained convinced that he could drive right up till a couple of years before he died though he had stopped driving a few years before that. He held a variety of jobs, most of which involved driving. Again, early photographs show him as very handsome with thick dark wavy hair and a moustache. He was still handsome even into old age, with a shock of white hair, but still with his moustache.

            I was only a baby when my father went away to the War. He was working as a lorry driver in a brickyard at that time and had become a reservist under a Government Scheme whereby all experienced motor car drivers were encouraged to register for service and be rewarded for doing so with £15 a year. In the event of a war, they would be called up to the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC). Several of the other drivers were reservists too and when they all received letters telling them that they were to report for duty immediately, they were in a quandary. Should they go right away or wait until after the weekend, they pondered?

            ‘Go now,’ their boss advised. ‘It’ll be a false alarm and you’ll be home Sunday night.’ The boss nearly went bankrupt and my father didn’t return home until the following February when I was a year old. He’d been with the British Expeditionary Force in France and returned to the severity of the 1940 winter, when he had to walk from Wigan to Horwich where we lived, in hedge-high snow carrying his rifle, kit bag and wet up to the waist. He was near exhaustion when a lone policeman offered to help him carry his gear and accompany him home.

          

Dad in Germany after the liberation 1945

  Many years later, he decided to write his memoirs of the war and they make for harrowing reading. As he spent most of the war driving staff officers to and fro, he wasn’t directly involved in any battles but in the retreat to the Dunkirk beaches, and being in the rear-guard with officers, there were several dodgy skirmishes. Somewhere along the line, he acquired a canteen of cutlery and lugged this around for many days along with his Bren gun, rifle, ammunition and gas mask. He and his comrades arrived on the Dunkirk beaches on 25^th May 1940. At that stage, there wasn’t a ship in sight but the beach and sand-hills were crowded with around 200,000 men. He could not imagine it being possible to evacuate everyone. After days of hell on the beaches, with little food or water and with constant bombing and machine gun fire, he was finally evacuated on 30^th May. Too exhausted to carry it any longer, he’d buried the canteen of cutlery and we often wondered if some French man had found it years later while metal detecting!

            By the time he got to writing about the Normandy invasion, his health had deteriorated with his writing almost indecipherable. He never actually said what date he landed in Normandy but I gained the impression that he was not involved in the first wave but that he and his unit followed on with the transport. Under heavy German fire, they landed at Gold Beach, the small port of Arromanches, where most of the commemoration events took place last week. I gather from his ramblings that he saw rather more action following the invasion than he had prior to Dunkirk. He was demobbed in 1946.

             My Dad was a loving, caring father and I remember my childhood being a happy time. Dad would sing silly songs he made up himself, wonderfully daft to the ears of a little girl. We had ‘rough and tumbles’ where he would tickle me until I was almost hysterical with laughter.  One time, it all got a bit out of hand and I somehow pinched his nose which swelled up like a ripe strawberry.  One of my favourite occupations, was sitting atop his shoulders as he sat in an armchair, plaiting, curling and pinning his luxurious dark hair. I once got a comb stuck in it and Mum had to cut it free, leaving a chunky gap in his hair. Years after, my own daughter would sit on his shoulders as I had, doing the self-same thing, to be followed by my niece when she was a little girl.

            I’ve written before about my parents being in domestic service so I won’t go into that again. They made an excellent team, though, she with her wonderful cooking, he in his butler role with the cutaway jacket and white gloves. Like the gardening, he’d never been taught, simply picked it up as he went along. They could, I believe, have gone much further than they did if only they’d stuck at it. As it was, Mum always became restless, wanting to move on to something different. After Dad died in 1999, she always claimed it was Dad who could never settle. I knew different though.

            Everyone who met my parents said how incredible they were, interested and interesting. I can only give humble thanks to them for giving me the precious gift of life and then, with their constant love and support, showing me how to live it.

           

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.