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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
