Aunt Lou
At the bottom of Manor Park Road lived Mum’s Aunt Lou. She and her husband Jim had four children: Jim, Jack, Louise and Henry. They and Mum’s family looked very much alike, because Aunt Lou was Mum’s mother’s sister, and their husbands were brothers. Thus, the two sisters married two brothers and so both families had the surname of Trusler.
Mum spent quite a lot of time at their house. They were all members of the Salvation Army and Louise, Mum’s cousin, was one of Mum’s special friends. Later on, Aunt Lou would sometimes ask Mum to go and give her a hand with the housework and to help make the beds. Mum’s reward would be to stay for dinner and have some of Aunt Lou’s meat pudding, a speciality.
After losing her husband Aunt Lou wore mostly long black clothes, right down to her stockings and shoes. I remember her one Christmas during the war when she came to Grandma’s wearing a little black straw hat with cherries on it. When she smiled it was obvious that she did not wear any dentures, and us children were fascinated watching her munching Christmas pudding.
A very tiny woman, there was a lot of sadness in her life. Her married daughter Louise died young of cancer, and one of her sons was divorced, splitting up the friendship she had with his wife. After her son remarried and went to live in Wales with his new wife, Aunt Lou, because of her age and ill health, was forced to leave Finchley and move to Wales and live with them, where later she died.
My mum always had sallow skin, not fair like my father and his family. My grandma was the same, dark brown eyes and black hair as a young woman, hair plaited and worn around her ears, being the fashion of the time. Grandma’s mother lived in a caravan, smoked a clay pipe, wore a flat cap and played an accordion. Could it be that at one time there were gypsies or travelling people among our ancestors? Who knows?
As Mum grew up, her first brother—Harold—was born, followed later by a frail little boy named Jim, which seemed to compensate for the loss of the two girls Ethel and Rosie. During the time of Jimmy’s birth, Mum was sixteen and from the age of fourteen she had been a great help at home. The one and only job she had was as a domestic helper, which involved housework and helping with children.
New homes were springing up on land that was once the fields leading to Hampstead, and young professional comfortably-off families were quickly moving in. They required the services of young girls, often poorly paid, who worked long hours washing, cleaning, cooking and returning home from their duties totally worn out.
When Mum’s little brother was born, her father said she would have to have time off from her job to help at home. Although there were no wages, Mum did not mind doing work for her own family, since her own mother was not a young woman anymore and her time giving birth had not been an easy one.
Mum remembers washing her mother’s hands and face, and plaiting her hair, running up and down the stairs with hot water for the Midwife. At the time near the birth, the nurse told my mum she was not old enough to be present there during it.
Grandma looked at the nurse. ‘If she is old enough to look after the family and me, it does not matter.’
After Jimmy was born Mum went back to work. She loved the little boy and treated him as if he was her own child, dressing him, coaxing him to eat and carrying him around everywhere.
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