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| Aunty Leah about 1914 |
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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.
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| Me with Aunty Leah about 1990 |
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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…
