Just a Boroughs Girl - Part 1

By Hair Hardwick

Me aged 6 months

My personal tribute to my home town and the internet facebook site of Northampton Past.

Me aged 5 years

I was born in the Barrett maternity home, and called Susan Johnson, and lived initially in Heathville and moved from there to Herbert Street in the area known as the boroughs. I was then aged around five years old. The majority of my early years of schooling, infants and juniors were at Spring Lane School which was situated more or less at the bottom of the street I lived in. I have many happy memories of the time I spent there and in the boroughs area. A lot of the sayings I have added to comments and things in Northampton past stemmed from my time living in that area.

Strangely perhaps, a lot of those memories are linked to what I now see as sad, the sites where streets were cleared to nothing but dusty spaces and rubble heaps, which we children spent hours building dens on. Today I see it very differently for I, like so many others I am sure, I wish a lot of that area still stood today.

My Grandad

The old row of shops, the pubs, the church and so much more, are gone and along with them the heart of what I now see as a real community, where folks helped others in a way you do not see happening anymore. Neighbours would be friends one day and enemies the next, but when push came to shove would stand together against wrong doing.

So many families lost touch after they moved away from the boroughs, and now generations later only some remain alive and well, hopefully a lot more than I believe, but their families, their children, their grandchildren go on, in other countries, or they are spread in this vast space we now, today, in 2012, know as our town.

Northampton Past

Progress has made this town a different place to that, which it once was and so many architectural mistakes have been made while the once proud town is lost in the midst of it, something that most in this site would agree with I think. Yet we are also aware that with progress came so many things that we rely on and use in our everyday lives. With progress came the planes that have taken many of the town’s people to other countries where they now live and where their families are producing the generations of the future.

During my lifetime I have seen so many changes; so many new things some along, things of which I cannot possibly list every one of or recall in one go. I can however tell of some of them. The jets used today for air travel, holidays and moving from one country to another, more or less all of the places aboard. The TV going then from black and white pictures to colour, on which neighbours gathered at our home while we all watched the first men land on the moon. Washing machines, tumble dryers, proper fridges instead of the little wooden boxes with a wire mesh front that once the common people would keep their fresh foods such as cheese and meat in to stop flies and insects descending on it, while milk would be kept in a bucket of cold water to stop it going sour. I have lived in homes where we would have to drag out a tin bath to fill to bathe properly in. Showers were not known back then to the likes of us, if they were to anyone for common use. No one back then would have believed you if you had told them there would ever be such a thing as a washing up machine for crockery and dishes inside homes. They would probably think of you as mad for even suggesting such a thing. If you told them the records a few people did have, would one day be a tiny metal disc played on sophisticated machines like there are today it would be the same, ‘yer mad’, they would say.

With progress also came the computers and without those, this site we are in would not be a place where we now have come together and we would not have access to it as we have now. The place where by making comments, adding pictures, maps and other documents we are slowly bringing together a unique collection of memorabilia of this town’s past. It is, I believe, an important site, and one from which I hope all members will pass on the knowledge of that they get from it, along with how to access it in the future, as those they tell get older and begin to find an interest in their own roots, just as we have.

Today, thankfully, within this site, there are members who are very important to it, those who run it today, those who paint pictures of things they see or recall or perhaps come across as time goes on, and one man who makes models of our town as not even we knew it but of years before that. So we learn and we go on learning, we go on remembering and adding to it by the memories things bring back to our minds once more.

Before I moved to the secondary school, the one and last school for me that eleven year olds went onto in my day, we moved to the area of Abington. My secondary school was Barry road secondary. I recall the very first day there, and what happened on that day, and what my mother told me afterwards, which changed my attitude at that time from one of anger to one of being proud. A girl was asked by her friend who I was, her reply came, ‘oh her, she’s a nobody, just a girl from the burrows. Ignore her!’

My Mum

That night when I got home I told my mother what had been said, and she told me, ‘but you are and don’t you ever be ashamed of it either. You may have been born while we lived at Heathville, but me and your dad were from the boroughs and so were our parents and theirs before them. So you are a borough girl and you be proud of it.’ I am still proud of that even today and ignored all or any future remarks that came in the same way from then on.

I grew and became a woman and along the way I made many friends with whom I wish I was still in touch with right now. But life is like that for us all. We move along with life and go our own way in the world. For me it was a child, marriage, along with work, and for many years I too moved away from my home town with the trade I was in, which was first as a publican and later a steward’s wife in the working men’s club world. When I came back to the town just about two years ago, I was stunned to find so many changes had taken place here. I had lost touch with old friends, and in some cases people I was once very close to. This site gave me, just like it has so many others, the chance to find a few of those old friends, make endless new ones, and feel I really am a town girl once more, even though I am now aged 62, and it lifts my heart to know people out there have had similar experiences because of this site, and how much it has given us and that it goes on doing so for all of us.

Credit for the idea of putting together the site goes to Frank Baverstock, while with the actual running of it credit also goes today, 13-06-2012, as I am writing this, to Mick Cox, Mary and all the admin team.

Via a niece I became aware of, and was offered the chance to join this site.

Today I am so glad I did. I still live by the things I learned from the days of my roots, right in the heart of the town, the boroughs. The sayings my mother and like all of them in that area tended to live by, such as

Manners cust ya nowt

Reap wat yer sow

Mek ya bed yer lie in it

Lying al cum back an bite yer in the bum

Yer cunt jus tek, yer as ter give a bit un all.

Ner se yer neighbur go ungry wun yer gut a crust o bread in yer larder.

Ya’ll burn yer fingers if ya steal owt.

Bully’s un cheats ner prosper.

And there are so many more old sayings, spoken in a language some find almost foreign today, that I find I still live by. But then I am a Northamptonian and proud to be so.

I still use so many of the common words and almost got myself into trouble in the site when I once called a person I did not know at the time, Love. For me things like me duck, love, matie, pal, guv, lady, im indoors, er o the road and things like that are normal still. I have used them all of my life and have no intention of stopping that. It’s me, its part of my life; it comes from my roots, roots I am proud of.

I hope, with all of my heart, that when I am long gone, when those who run this site or are members of it today are also gone, that there will be new admin’s to take their places just as new members too. It’s important; it’s a record, of us, the people of the town, those from the very heart of it whose ancestors built it.

This is of course just a small amount of what I can tell you. Others are telling it all right here in this site, just as I hope to continue to do as and when things come to me.

It’s a record, it’s important, it’s our town, it’s my town, it’s
NORTHAMPTON.