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Number 3 Goldsmith Road may have seemed a drab place by today’s standards, but Mum always kept the brass knocker, bell and letterbox gleaming with Bluebell metal polish. However, the hall inside was dark and unwelcoming, the walls still having the old brown Victorian varnish paper that had been there for years. The only bright thing was the blue lino floor coverings, and these were frequently polished until they shone using Mansion wax polish. There were two small slip mats which Mum had made, one outside the bedroom door and the other outside the living room.
The bathroom at the end of the hall downstairs had a pink frosted glass window. There was a toilet with a polished wooden seat and a bath standing on its own four legs, but because in those early days it had no surround, it looked very stark compared to today’s fitted suites. There was a paper shortage too, so there was no soft toilet tissue, just very hard shiny squared sheets, which did not seem to do the job properly. If Mum ran out, then to make do, she would cut out squares of newspaper, which were suspended from the toilet system on a piece of string. God knows what our rear ends would have been like using today’s newspapers? The ink comes off so easily, so we would have been permanently black.
During the dark winter months, our lives were spent in the living room. I always recollected it as being painted green, the walls coated in cream-coloured distemper stippled with pale green. Uncle Pete, despite his poor disabled leg, had decorated the room while Dad was away in the Army, but a few months later, after a bad frost, the water tank in the loft burst and flooded everywhere, leaving a stain on the newly-painted ceiling.
There was an Ideal boiler in the chimney cavity, which heated the hot water in a tank contained in a cupboard next to it. Our clothes were always warmed and well aired in the cupboard, including our winceyette nightdresses that we wore at bedtime. Mum saw to it that after we’d had a good scrub with Lifebuoy soap, we went to bed with a hot water bottle each. The bedroom was always freezing cold so it was just as well she did.
In the living room was a large built-in dresser where the cups hung on hooks and rows of plates and saucers overlapped. It was a bit difficult getting down the plates without breaking any (well it was for me, anyway). There were short supplies of things at this time, and at one point we only had about half a dozen of anything left.
The two drawers in the dresser were mostly filled with odds and ends which, on occasions after the war, became a place of storage for apples or pears given to Dad that needed ripening. Wrapped in newspapers, they were a great temptation to us, so naturally, one or two would disappear now and then. Under the drawers were the cupboards for our few toys—mostly rag dolls, books and old boxes of paints. These spaces were cleared out now and then but still always a jumble.
Then there was the larder. This was a large walk-in cupboard with a marble shelf. We had no fridge, and as the milk went off quite a lot in the summer months, Mum would put it in a bucket of water with a damp cloth over it. The floorboards of the cupboard had become so rotten, that I once went straight through the worm-eaten wood, screaming so loudly that my Mum must have thought I was being murdered. I knew we had mice in the house and the thought of encountering them beneath the floor frightened me.
Mum did most of the chores in the small kitchen, or scullery as we knew it, and this was badly in need of repair because the hot steam from the washing in the winter had made the distempered walls peel and the woodwork soft and rotten. There used to be a concrete copper (which Dad had taken out in later years) and this was a marble top table, under which stood a tin bath where soiled clothes were left ready for the washing. There was an ancient enamelled-metal cooking stove which Mum had a job to keep clean, and a shelf high above on which aluminium saucepans were kept in rows, always shiny and well-scoured.
Under the window, covered by a small piece of laced curtain, was a deep ceramic Butler sink. Mum always seemed to be standing over it, sleeves rolled up to her elbows with a wood and glass scrubbing board and a brand of soap called Sunlight, mixed with plenty of washing soda. Her hands would be red and sore, her wrapped-round floral apron wet at the front and hair limp and straggling out of the hair net she wore to try to keep it in place.
Poor Mum! If only she had known then that better things were to come to her, that one day she would fly to Majorca, as well as visit Italy and Ibiza; perhaps it would have given her some hope. As it was, she accepted our humble existence the way many others in the same boat did. Life was drab. There were no holidays. Just wet washday Mondays, scrubbing the doorstep, polishing and making ends meet.
Us girls though, we did not worry too much about domestic things. On fine days there was the back garden, the old coal shed in one corner and a large plum tree with worn off bark that my sister loved to climb. It only ever seemed to bear half a dozen plums at one time and no one ever thought to prune it.
After the war, Dad became interested in growing tomatoes and for this he whitewashed a wall on one side of the garden to reflect the sunlight. The old metal cauldron-like liner of our demolished copper served as a mixing vessel for a mixture of horse manure, the contents of the chamber pot and rabbit’s droppings from the larger shed at the bottom of the garden. On a warm day the smell could be obnoxious.
‘It’s good stuff,’ Dad would say. Indeed, the tomato plants under the whitewashed wall thrived on it, as he said they would. He also was good at growing lettuce and carrots, and we loved those carrots. In fact, we got into trouble for pulling and eating them, and then sticking the tops back in the soil, hoping he wouldn’t notice!
We had picnics in the garden with china tea pots from the doll’s tea set filled with water, biscuits, or bread and butter cut into squares. There was a large old privet hedge with a gaping hole in the middle where we would push our way inside. An old piece of carpet would do to sit on, and with an old curtain hanging over it, it made a house, a tent… well, anything we liked to imagine.
Barbara had a tortoise. There was a hole in one corner of its shell, through which we had tied a piece of string, which in turn was secured to an old gramophone cabinet the tortoise lived inside of, with beds of straw and a supply of cabbage leaves and lettuce. The doors of the cabinet would be lifted open for the creature to wander about at will, but only as far as the string. One day he went missing. Holding the tortoise up with one hand, the man next door called my sister.
‘Is this your animal, Barbara? It’s eaten half my strawberries.’ The tortoise had a satisfied look on its face, juice dripping from its mouth, and the chewed piece of string hanging down.
My Dad often had funny ideas, such as the time he made the mistake of buying a small fox terrier puppy from someone at the pub.
‘This is my dog,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anyone messing it about and spoiling it.’
Judie was decided on for a name. It was a pretty little thing, but seemed totally mad from the moment it came. She was put out in the garden shed at night, but after neighbours complained of it yapping and crying, Mum said she could come inside. Next morning, we found our slippers chewed, the newspapers destroyed, mess inside Mum’s shoe and a chunk torn out of my sister’s pyjamas. The curtains were also ripped, not that they were anything to write home about.
‘That’s it,’ said Mum. ‘It will have to go.’
Dad gave Judie to one of his mates down the pub and she was never seen again.
In later years, Dad bought a ferret called Joey. He and Uncle Phil would take it down to Auntie Dorothy’s in Kent to catch rabbits. Mum did not like the animal. Besides the smell, it had a nasty gleam in its little red eyes. One day it escaped from the cage and Mum franticly looked for it among the cabbages in the garden. She found it alright. It snapped at her, and as she lifted her hand, I saw the ferret hanging on the end of one of her fingers.
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