Wednesday, July 11, 2012

A 1960's Childhood in Northampton - Part Two Life with Grandma

My father’s mother lived with us and I now realize that she made life very difficult for my parents, but at the time very little of the tension and frustration was noticeable to me. I had no idea that she had not wanted a grandchild because she was jealous of her place in the family, and by the time I was old enough to notice, she had recovered from her deep disappointment that I was not a boy. In her eyes boys were superior because she had produced a son (my father) who was allegedly born potty trained, walking and talking and with impeccable manners! Despite her initial rejection we grew to love each other and she had a massive influence on my life.

Grandma with my grandfather Mick

Grandma had known real poverty in her childhood. Like many men of his day her father drank and her mother struggled to raise her large family. As an adult she had lived through two world wars, three of her brothers died in the first war and another brother was injured; then like countless other mothers she had to live with the fear of losing her precious son in the second war. By the time I arrived she had been a widow for more than a decade, but the loss of my grandfather Mick had left her with a deep and enduring sadness. Sometimes I would go with her to tend his grave at Kingsthorpe cemetery, she called it “Grandpa’s little garden”. Much more often I would curl up on her bed eating a finger of her special Callard and Bowsers desert nougat while she told me stories about him. Through her memories my Grandfather and Grandma’s whole family became far more than names, they are still as real to me as if I had actually known them.


Food rationing had finally ended in 1954 and when I arrived in the early 1960s I was given the best of everything. My mother bought rose-hip syrup from the chemist, this was diluted with water and I had a glass full every day to make me 'big and strong'. I was given rich and creamy gold top milk because it was good for me - how times have changed! Needless to say my baby photos are deeply embarrassing; I look like the Michelin Man's daughter.

My grandma would often tell me that a little of what you fancy does you good, and as she cooked she would give me a handful of raisins or a little taste of whatever she was cooking. Best of all I liked it when she baked cakes, I stood on a chair next to her and watched fascinated, eager to be allowed to scrape the bowl when she had finished.  Often she told me stories while she cooked, sometimes it was about always being hungry when she was a little girl, or about coping with food rationing during the war. On Thursdays it was half closing day so we could all eat together, my grandma always cooked fish and chips on Thursdays and I stood on my chair watching as she dipped each piece of fish into raw egg and then into homemade breadcrumbs. When we had haddock she showed me the black mark on the skin which she said was put there to remind us of the thumb print of Jesus and the way he blessed the five loves and two fishes so that there was enough food to feed five thousand people.

She had a big blue and white striped jar filled with lumps of cooking salt and she would break off a piece to add to the saucepan when cooking vegetables.   She never weighed anything she gauged the quantities needed by eye or with an old cup and a spoon. She kept a chipped cup for measuring flour, sugar and other dry ingredients and another cup with a broken handle to break eggs into. She would never break an egg straight into the mixing bowl because a bad egg would spoil everything and she hated waste. Nothing was wasted. The meat left over from our Sunday roast was sliced and eaten cold with vegetables and gravy on Monday and any leftover meat was minced and used to make another meal. I loved that old mincer, a big heavy thing that gripped the side of the table, I always wanted to turn the handle but I wasn’t strong enough so grandma would put her hand over mine and we turned it together. Cooking in those days required strength and stamina; grandma could beat the mixture by hand faster and for longer than I have ever managed. She used a little hand whisk with a turn handle to whisk egg whites, a job that I was sometimes trusted with but it took me much longer to achieve the stiff white peaks that she wanted.

Kenwood Mixer
We did have some modern gadgets, grandma loved the Kenwood mixer, but she only used it if she was doing a lot of baking, otherwise she would get the mixing bowl out and do everything by hand. We had an automatic washing machine; it was a Hoover Keymatic; thick plastic squares with notches in the edge pushed into a slot on the front of the machine, the notches represented different wash programs. That machine lasted right through my childhood. We had a drying rack on a pulley. When not in use it was wound all the way up to the kitchen ceiling, but when there were damp garments to be dried it was let down, the garments were  placed over the wooden poles and then it was pulled back up towards the ceiling. In the corner there was a big Colston dish washing machine. It was very noisy and a bit temperamental and grandma seemed to think that it was quicker and easier to do the washing up by hand.

The Bible played a big part in my grandma's life and she would often read stories to me from my big illustrated children's Bible. I liked the Old Testament stories best of all, Daniel in the lion's den, Moses in the bulrushes, David and Goliath and the parting of the Red Sea; my favourite was the story of God speaking to Samuel. Grandma's own Bible was kept by her bed, I was too young to read it but I knew I wasn't going to like it because it was full of rules to stop us having fun. According to Grandma it was wrong to play outside on a Sunday, I could walk in the park but I was not allowed to play on the swings. We couldn't sew or knit on a Sunday because it would make God unhappy and even the thought of playing cards on a Sunday was terribly wicked. 

Unfortunately for my parents Grandma had turned disapproval into a performance art and she could always quote a Bible verse to support her beliefs. When miniskirts became popular Grandma was scandalised and she warned that it was as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah. When my mother wore a mini skirt Grandma announced that she had lived too long and she would be glad when her time came. She disapproved of my mother's make up too, she told me that the body was the temple of God and we should not put that muck on our faces; just to be sure that I got the message she told me that lipstick was made of beetle's blood. Grandma used face powder, but when my mum pointed out that powder was also make up Grandma was indignant, she insisted that it was not to make her look attractive, it was just to take the shine off her nose! Poor mum, it must have been hard to keep her temper at times.



My mum and dad worked all day every day and all morning on Sundays, so Grandma did some of the washing and ironing. She would sigh and mutter as she folded the underwear. Many of my mother’s clothes caused comment from my grandmother, but none more than her pants which according to Grandma were shamefully small and not even fit to be cut up for dusters. They were what we would describe today as a full brief, but in comparison to Grandma’s knee length bloomers they were skimpy. We were not poor, but old and worn out under garments were cut up and used as dusters, floor cloths, polishing cloths etc. Outgrown clothes were passed on and worn out clothes were cut up; buttons were saved in a big tin and any usable material was saved to be used again later. I was still very young when I was taught to sew and I loved to rummage through the ‘bit bag’ to find pretty scraps of material to make oven gloves, needle cases, dolls clothes or such like.

Campbell Street, Northampton 
Grandma sometimes took me to visit her niece Elsie and her sister in law Ada, they had a little china shop on Campbell Street. We would walk up to look through the railings into Seps churchyard at the sheep grazing among the headstones. I loved the sheep; sometimes they would wander up and lick my fingers. My grandma was less impressed with the sheep; she thought it was disrespectful to allow them to wander among the gravestones but I told her that if I was dead I would like to have the sheep there. Grandma would look across towards the church and when I asked what she was looking at she would say that she was just remembering. I didn’t understand at the time that so many of her memories were linked to that area. She grew up in Monks Pond Street but when she was in her teens the family moved to 24 Campbell Street. Her sisters Elsie and Lizzie had their shop in Campbell Street, she had worked with them and when they had died the business had passed to her. There must have been so many memories……………

At that time the redevelopment of the Boroughs was underway, it caused her great sadness to see the area reduced to rubble. In particular she regretted the loss of St Andrew’s Church where she was married. She conceded that many of the buildings needed knocking down but she said that she would have felt much better about it if they had replaced it with something better. She often said that they didn’t know what they were doing by breaking up the communities and she was convinced that they were storing up trouble for the future. Perhaps she was right.

Grandma had lots of little sayings. If I whistled she would inform me that “a whistling woman and a crowing hen is neither good for God nor men”, it didn’t make much difference, I still whistled. She would often tell me to “tell the truth and shame the devil” I wasn’t so sure about shaming the devil, but I soon learnt that it was a lot easier to tell the truth than to be caught in a lie. When she was feeling unappreciated she would say “you’ll miss me when I’m gone” and of course she was right, I missed her very much. She died suddenly following an operation just a couple of days before her 83rd birthday. She had cancer of the cervix; the cancer was entirely preventable, it would never have happened if she wasn’t such a prude. Unbelievably she had suffered a prolapse as a result of giving birth and rather than discuss such an intimate problem with a doctor she had relied for nearly fifty years on the self-help measures available over the counter in those days!! I think she was ready to die, life had moved on and she hadn’t kept up, but I wasn’t ready to lose her, I was just 12, she was my link to the past and I still had so many questions to ask her.

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