Another blast from the past

Aunty Leah about 1914

The last time I posted a memoire blog, I mentioned that we were leaving Birmingham, where we’d lived for three years and were returning to Lancashire. This time were to move back to Bolton, where Dad had been brought up and where his mother’s family, the Harris’s lived. We were to stay, for the time being, with Dad’s Auntie Leah, his mother’s youngest sister, who had inherited the Harris family home at 16 Radcliffe Road. It was a terraced house that opened straight onto the street and delightfully old-fashioned with horsehair-stuffed sofas and chairs, scrubbed kitchen table, plain wooden chairs and a stone sink in the adjoining scullery. The black-leaded range, the fender that surrounded it, the horse brasses all around, gleamed with Auntie Leah’s constant polishing. Upstairs, there were brass bedsteads with feather mattresses and ticking-covered bolsters, heavy Edwardian wardrobes and chamber pots under the bed. And yes, they were used but only in the night as there was only an outside toilet.

              To get to it, you had to go through my great-grandfather’s lean-to workshop. This place, piled high with bits of old junk and ancient tools, all gathering cobwebs, fascinated me. There were rusty tins and jars of screws, old pots of paint and brushes long since solidified. Yet it was not untidy, it was all stacked in an orderly fashion on neat, but very dusty shelves. Going back many years later to visit Auntie Leah, I found the lean-to had been pulled down and all that glorious junk had been relegated to the dustbin.

              I loved my Auntie Leah. She was Dad’s aunt really, my great-aunt, a little round dumpling of a woman, then in her late forties, with the same open face and trusting eyes of my grandmother’s photograph. She always had red cheeks, a smile on her face and a cheery manner, all of which endeared her to the many customers of Yates’ Wine Lodge in Bolton, where she served in the off-licence section. She was well known in Bolton for working in the ‘offy’.

Born in 1900, she lived to be 95. When the house in Radcliffe Road was pulled down to make way for a new road, sometime in the 1960s I think, she went to live with her two nieces, my Dad’s cousins. Still later, and not in the best of health, she went to live in a residential home for the elderly. Going to visit her there occasionally, she would sometimes slip into long silences, perhaps thinking of all those who had gone before her and missing them. Every now and then she would come out with a little story from the past.

              Like the time she got into a fight with a particularly obnoxious girl who lived in the same street. Sensing that she was losing and being only small, she ran up some nearby steps and, pulling off one of her clogs, hit her opponent over the head with it. When the other child’s mother came to complain, her Dad, known as Owd Bill, shut her up with the remark, ‘Ah’ve only one thing to say to thee, it’s a crying shame our Leah didn’t hit that lass with t’other clog an’ all!’

              In 1949 and 1950 when we were living at Radcliffe Road, my parents were working much of the time and as Auntie Leah was home when I got in from school in the afternoons, it was she who tended to look after me. We became great friends, for she had a great sense of fun and whether it was because she’d never married, had retained her own childlike innocence, despite where she worked. I still remember the golden brown toast she made for my breakfast, toasted in the traditional way with a toasting fork in front of the fire and served dripping with butter.

              Very often, she and I would have pasties from Waites’ Bakery on Bury New Road. Never before or since, have I tasted such delicious pasties. Golden crusty pastry, steam and gravy oozing from little flaps in the top, tasty bits of meat, succulent slices of potato, all separated and discernible. Not all like the mush they serve up these days and daringly call savoury pies. I’m sure the pasties they baked in that shop contravened umpteen health regulations, not to mention EU directives, but I seem to have thrived on it.

              It was a time, too, of widening my horizons, of getting to know Bolton. Dad had two jobs at that time, one in the afternoon delivering the Bolton Evening News from the printing presses in Mealhouse Lane and Shipgates to various newsagents, the other in the early morning, delivering milk from one of those slow electric floats. Sometimes, if I could get up early enough, he’d take me with him on a Saturday morning to collect the money. I loved those bright, crisp and often cold sunny days when no-one else was about. Mum was working as a cook in the canteen of a paint and wallpaper manufacturers on the corner of Radcliffe Road and Bury Old Road, opposite the Palace cinema, the local ‘flea-pit’.

              The Bolton days served as my introduction proper to the Harris relations of whom there seemed many. They lived a few streets away from Radcliffe Road in 368 Bury Old Road and I very often called there on my way home from school, particularly if Auntie Leah was working. Auntie Susie was Auntie Leah’s sister-in-law and a widow. Her daughter May, who’d never married, still lived at home and their house, like Auntie Leah’s, was a treasure trove for a little girl. It, too, was old-fashioned with sepia photographs and heavy furniture but what I mostly remember about the house’s physical aspects was that it had a ‘tippler,’ an outside toilet. This fascinated yet repelled me because it had a wooden seat covering a hole which dropped some way into the ground where I suppose it joined the main sewer. I was always frightened of falling in, but it was never possible as the wooden seat filled the space between the two walls of the lavatory. It was always spotlessly clean, with the seat scrubbed almost white and the walls whitewashed every year. When I went visiting the Bury Old Road house several years later, the older ‘tippler’ toilet wasn’t used anymore and had been replaced with a toilet and bathroom converted from one of the smaller bedrooms.

              By far and away the most rewarding experience during that time in Bolton was school. Up till then, I don’t think I’d sparkled at anything. The school, endowed in early Victorian times by a member of the Ridgway family, bleachers of Horwich and Bolton, was only about five minutes’ walk from Radcliffe Road. It wasn’t a particularly large school, probably only a couple of hundred pupils, yet it was the first school I actually enjoyed. This was largely because of Mr Williams, my teacher. Whatever he was teaching, he invested it with interest and humour, arousing my own natural curiosity and imagination. Where previously I had found school work a hard slog, I suddenly began to find it easier.

Me with Aunty Leah about 1990

              In February 1950, I was 11 and I had to make a choice of whether to take the Dreaded Eleven Plus examination for a grammar school place or go to a secondary modern school. At a parents’ evening which I attended with Mum and Dad, Mr Williams said, ‘I want Anne to take the Eleven Plus for a place at Bolton School.’ Bolton School was the big grammar school of Bolton, with mostly all fee-paying pupils but with some scholarship places. My parents were stunned into silence. ‘Even if she doesn’t get to Bolton School, she’ll get a place at Bolton County Grammar.’ I didn’t really mind as the pink-stoned, court-yarded Bolton School fronting on to Chorley New Road was over-imposing and I was sure I’d feel out of place there. Whereas the solid, many-windowed, block-like substance of the County Grammar School adjacent to the Parish church and not far from where we lived was much more appealing.

              To tell the truth, I wasn’t convinced I’d do well enough to go to either. Yet Mr Williams convinced me I could do it. ‘If you don’t pass this exam,’ he told me on the morning I sat for it, ‘I shall be an old man before the day is out.’ He made me feel pretty important and very special, like it really mattered to him.

              Nothing previously experienced measured up to sitting in a strange room with a blank piece of paper in front of me and knowing that there was no escape for a couple of hours. The secret, I found, was to cope with one question at a time and not look too far ahead. Odd to think that for someone so normally lacking in confidence and basically shy, I didn’t find examinations as frightening as some of my more confident school mates.

              I passed the Dreaded Eleven Plus, though not for Bolton School, and was all set to go to Bolton County Grammar School. Except that I never got there! To be continued…

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.

RNA Conference 2014 and Newport, Shropshire

Anne outside the Newport lock-keeper's cottage

Hard to believe that exactly one week ago today, I was in Telford, Shropshire, for the opening of the 2014 Conference of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. My feeling is that I’d like to do it all again this weekend because attending a RNA Conference is such a brilliant experience. The outpouring of friendship is obvious from the word go when published authors mix with unpublished ones and no-one can tell the difference. There’s always a number of conference ‘virgins’ (I was one myself three years ago) and everyone goes out of their way to make them feel at home. Not difficult with such a convivial atmosphere.

The workshops that I attended were all brilliant and, as I’m intending to self-publish my novel A Suitable Young Man later this year, a couple that I attended were angled at just that subject. Unfortunately, I didn’t arrive in time to attend the one entitled ‘I did it my way’ whereby 2 best-selling authors who chose independent publishing explained the reasons and the process. But on the Saturday, I listened to Alison Baverstock with Hazel Gaynor talking on self-publishing trends and revelations. Later that same day, I attended one by Ian Skillcorn of Corazon books speaking on everything you wanted to know about self-publishing and marketing.

Family of swans on Newport Canal

The venue of the Conference was the Harper Adams University, set in beautiful Shropshire countryside. Being an agrigultural college, one had to excuse the rural whiff that wafted through the air on occasions. Although the address was Telford, in fact the location was nearer to the small town of Newport. When I discovered this fact, I was thrilled because one of my great-grandmothers was born there. Because her father was a canal agent and lock-keeper, she was born in the lock-keeper’s cottage by the side of the Newport Canal, a subsidiary of the Shropshire Union Canal. So, on the Sunday afternoon, when my husband had picked me up, we went exploring. Sadly, only the roof of the lock-keeper's cottage was visible through the high hedge. Although the canal is now disused, we found it easily enough as it runs through the town. Later, we spent a couple more days based at Madeley Court Hotel and had a lovely time visiting the Ironbridge Gorge.

As I said at the beginning, I could do it all again!