The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  The houses were built from the cheapest materials. The brick floors were laid directly onto the bare earth and so were always damp, there were flimsy internal partition walls, and there was usually only a single course of bricks separating each house from its neighbour. The ventilation, insulation and soundproofing were all inadequate, with arguments or raised voices in one house echoing through the neighbouring houses. There was usually no interior plumbing and sometimes there was not even an inside tap, and no damp course, so that mildew and rising damp were always a problem. In a low-lying city like York there was the added risk of flooding, which could occur at any time of the year.

  Madge’s house was damp and decaying, with rotting window frames and black mould on some of the walls. There was no electric light and no lights at all in the bedrooms or the kitchen, just one gas mantle in the front room. If they needed light elsewhere in the house, they had to use candles. The three toilets in the yard at the back were shared between five houses, but it was at least a house of their own, and after two years in one cramped room in a shared house, that was good enough for Madge. ‘It’s marvellous how you manage if you have to, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Well, you have to, I suppose, don’t you?’

  The houses in Townend Street had already been condemned before they moved in and were set to be demolished, but with the war breaking out, they were left standing and Madge and Bill ended up living there for nine years. There was no bathroom, of course, just the standard tin bath that hung on a hook on the wall outside in the yard, and Madge would put it in front of the fire to wash her children. They had a fire oven, but coal was so dear – two shillings and elevenpence a bag – and money so tight that Madge would often buy ‘six-pennorth’ of cinders instead. First thing in the morning, in the bitter winter weather and often when she was pregnant, she would wheel her empty pram down to the coal yard near the River Foss and queue outside the big gates, waiting for the yard to open. If you were late getting there, often there were no cinders left. She remembers standing there for half an hour on a day so bitter that her arms had gone white and numb from her elbows to her fingertips, and her hands were so cold that she could not even grip the handle of the pram. When she was at last let in, the coal man filled up the pram with cinders and then she had to push it back up the hill again.

  All the clothes, sheets and nappies had to be washed by hand, and as her husband had to wear all-whites for his work, there was never any shortage of washing to be done. Madge didn’t get a washing machine until many years later, and even then it was second-hand – she paid five shillings for it – but after all those years of hand-washing everything, she thought it was wonderful. ‘Those were the days!’ she says now, with a laugh. ‘A lot now don’t realize how tough life was back then.’

  There was an air-raid shelter in the yard, but when the great air raid on York took place in April 1942, Madge did not have time to get to the shelter. She was pregnant with her second daughter, Hazel, and her eldest, Fay, was still only little – there was just a year and ten months between them. The sirens went and then the bombs started falling, so Madge got under the table with Fay and they just sat there, listening to the sound of aircraft overhead, the whistle of the bombs falling and the crump of explosions. The noise of bomb blasts got louder and louder, and then they were dropping all around them. It sounded as though the bombs were falling in the street in front of them and then in the yard behind, and Madge really thought her time had come. In fact, they weren’t quite that close, but one did fall just along the street, and Park Grove School diagonally across the street in front of the house was hit as well.

  Madge and her sisters had always thought their mum would be the first of their parents to die, both because of her size and because she had had a series of operations and was often in terrible pain, but she was a strong woman and lived to a ripe old age. Instead, Madge’s dad was the first to go, dying of a stroke not long after Fay was born. In the cruel way that even the closest families can sometimes manage, one or two of her siblings implied to Madge that she was to blame for his death because her father had been so worried about her living with her abusive, drunken husband that the stress had caused the stroke that killed him. It was another private burden for her to carry, another blow to her self-esteem.

  Madge and Bill were still living in the same house at the end of the war, but after she gave birth to her youngest daughter, Lynne, in 1949, there were then two adults and three children living in a small, damp and crumbling two-up, two-down. Before the war there had been plenty of families in much more overcrowded conditions than that – the house she’d grown up in wasn’t much bigger and had ten children in it – but the new Labour Government was committed to eradicating overcrowding and slum housing, and Madge and her family were given a new council house. Their old one was demolished under the slum clearance programme, though strangely enough, a couple of houses were left standing at the end of Townend Street and are still there today, even though the rest of the street was knocked down.

  Madge had gone back to work at Rowntree’s after Fay and Hazel were born, but had stopped working again when she was pregnant with Lynne. Not long after she was born, one of the supervisors came to see Madge and said, ‘We’ve got a special order for some fancy boxes, enough work for a month or two, would you like to come back?’ She jumped at the chance, went back for two months, and ended up working in the Card Box Mill for over twenty years. More and more of the Card Box Mill’s production was of plainer boxes like Black Magic and Dairy Box, but there was still a demand for more expensive, hand-made or hand-finished boxes, for Valentine’s Day, Easter or Christmas presents, and occasionally deluxe boxes were made for special orders like the ones covered in golden silk that Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother used to order by the dozen as Christmas gifts. Madge and her workmates often wondered whether the Queen Mother actually paid for them or if she was presented with them as Rowntree’s Christmas gift to her.

  Every year, when Madge received her profit share bonus at Easter or Whitsuntide, she used to buy her girls a new dress or buy the material to make them one. She claims that she’s ‘no good at knitting from a pattern’, but she used to knit pullovers and matching cardigans with complex patterns for her girls. Hazel still remembers an outfit her mum made for her with a cream skirt, sweater and cardigan with a pattern of yellow ducks chasing each other round the bottom of it. With her two eldest girls being close together in age, Madge often dressed them in similar outfits, but that did not always work out for the best, and the girls once had a prolonged, furious argument over who would wear the cream and who would have to wear the beige version of a beautiful flowered dress with ribbons to tie at the side.

  Although Madge tried to hide her bruises and shield her daughters from the worst of her husband’s violence, in later years the two eldest girls, Fay and Hazel, told her things that showed that they had always known what a brute and a bully he could be. Either because Madge no longer argued with him, or because he had mellowed with the passing years, or just because he was older and weaker, he had become less violent towards her by the time their youngest daughter was born.

  The only real respite Madge had from her work at the factory and at home, and the demands of her husband, were the times she spent at her mum and dad’s house with the children, when, if only for a few hours, she could enjoy something of the warm family atmosphere of her childhood. There were also occasional street parties, like the one to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. Tables were laid in Rose Street from end to end, and all the houses were decked out with Union flags, paper garlands and bunting – though none were as beautifully decorated as Madge’s mum’s house, where her paper flowers were once more framing the door. The children had running races on the back field while the adults drank and ate, or gathered for a singsong around the piano that had been pushed out into the street, and, like many other people in Britain, Madge watched television for the very first time, crowding with a group of neighbours into on
e of their front parlours to watch the coronation ceremony on a set that had been bought or rented for the occasion.

  Madge also had two brief stays at the Cocoa Works Rest Home, Dunollie, in Scarborough. Most of her workmates had been there to recover from illness, operations or bereavements, and one day Madge said to one of the supervisors, ‘All these girls are going to Dunollie and I’ve never had the chance to go.’ The supervisor said to her, ‘You’re too healthy, that’s why! But would you like to go?’

  Madge said that she would love to and the supervisor promptly arranged it for her. Much to Bill’s audibly expressed disgust, Madge went off without him and spent a week at Dunollie, and then, later on, when she had been in hospital for an operation, Rowntree’s sent her back there for another week’s rest and recuperation. Then it was back to her life with Bill. Helped by the greater financial security guaranteed by the post-war Labour Government’s social reforms, women of the next generation no longer risked destitution if they left their husband, and divorce no longer seemed inconceivable, but for Madge, fear of her husband and the needs of her children meant that there could be no diversion from the path she had chosen when she married Bill Burrow. For her it really would be ‘until death do us part’.

  9

  Dorothy

  Dorothy Birch was born in Heslington Road in York in 1936, a damp, low-lying area of the city where the autumn mists seemed to hang over the area for days on end. She was still only a baby when the family home and the whole of their street were condemned under the slum clearance programme. They were crumbling terraced houses, in a desperate state of repair and overrun with vermin, so the family was moved to Clifton, where they were building new houses. ‘I have a picture of me sitting on my auntie’s knee,’ she says, ‘and in the background you can see them still building the houses behind us, so they must have been moving people in as fast as they could, even while they were still building the rest.’

  Her mother died suddenly in 1938 when Dorothy was just two years old, and she has no memories of her at all. Her father, James, worked shifts at Rowntree’s in the Melangeur department, and even though Dorothy cannot have been more than three at the time, she can clearly remember waiting for him and seeing him coming down the road on his way home from work – it is her earliest memory. She was still only three when war broke out and her dad had to go off to war, leaving behind Dorothy and her sister, who was five years older, and hoping that their grandmother – her dad’s mother – would be able to look after them.

  For the next six years they were brought up by their grandmother. ‘We were fortunate,’ Dorothy says, ‘because she and the rest of the family all rallied round and helped each other to look after us.’ A lot of their clothing was hand-me-downs or second-hand, but if they needed shoes, their grandmother made sure they always got new ones, not second-hand, though they were usually plimsolls, which were all their grandmother could afford.

  Her grandparents’ house was small, with ‘a right houseful of people living in it’, Dorothy says. ‘We were sleeping three and four to a bed, though my grandmother and granddad had a room to themselves. I was only little and I slept in the middle of our bed with my big sister on one side and my cousin on the other. We shared that room and that bed for years and as I got squashed between the two bigger girls or got woken when they snored or tossed and turned, I used to dream of having a room of my own one day.’

  There was never a time when Dorothy’s grandmother and granddad didn’t have a house full of kids. Even when some of their own children grew up and moved away, there were already grandchildren to take their place. Of their own children, their son Arthur, Dorothy’s uncle, was in the Army, serving in the Black Watch regiment, and he had married and was living away, but his brother still lived at Dorothy’s grandmother’s with his wife and children. Dorothy and her sister were also permanent residents, and after the war there was their dad, too, because when he came home, he moved in as well.

  The house was always crowded and noisy and the only time the children had to themselves was when they were outside. Dorothy and her sister played rounders, hopscotch and other games for hours with the other kids in the streets; ‘Even the grown-ups used to come out and join in with us sometimes,’ she says, chuckling at the memory. They would also often go over to Clifton, where there was a disused aerodrome, and they would play in the fields behind it for hours. ‘We’d be jumping over the becks,’ Dorothy says, ‘and damming them with mud and stones, trying to make little pools and waterfalls; nobody used to bother us up there.’

  At weekends and in the school holidays, those days seemed endless and carefree, but with so many people in the house to care for, the children were all expected to work for their keep and to do their chores before they went out to play or to school. ‘Every day my grandmother would give each of us children a job to do before we went to school in the morning, and again before we went out to play after school or at weekends,’ Dorothy recalls, ‘and there was no question of postponing it or not doing it; when Grandma said “Jump”, that’s what you did. If she wanted meat from the butchers in Clifton – and it was a long walk from our house – or a “penny duck”, a bit like a faggot, for my grandfather’s lunch, she’d send me off to get it before I set off for school in the morning. If I complained, she’d just say, “If you’re late for school, it’s your own fault, you should have got up earlier. Now you go there first and get that meat before you go to school.”’ There was a specific day for each job around the house – washing day, ironing day, baking day, cleaning day and so on – and with no washing machine, no vacuum cleaner, nor anything else to make life easier, the jobs took all day.

  Her grandmother was very strict with the children. ‘At the time, we always used to think she was hard,’ Dorothy says, ‘because she thought nothing of giving you a good smack, but looking back I can see that she must have had it hard herself, bringing her own children up and then having to do it all again with her children’s children as well, and always being so short of money that she never had two coppers to rub together. She must have got quite frustrated at times.’

  Dorothy’s grandmother was no less strict when it came to illness. ‘You weren’t mollycoddled in those days,’ Dorothy says. ‘If you had a cold or something like that, you just had to get on with it. If I said to my grandmother, “I’ve got a cold,” she’d just say, “Well, you can still get up and go to work.” I’ve been a bit like that with my own children, but I don’t think I was quite as strict!’

  Some families would try to avoid calling in the doctor in any circumstances, because in the era before the National Health Service, a doctor’s bill was not cheap. However, certain infectious diseases like measles had to be registered with a doctor, and with a serious illness, however short of money the family might have been, it would reach a point where the doctor had to be called in, though some exercised discretion when treating patients from the poorer parts of York. Sometimes a bill would be heavily reduced or waived altogether if the family had fallen on hard times. ‘I remember my dad telling me that when my mother was ill and in an awful lot of pain,’ Dorothy says, ‘he had to pay for her medication and it was an awful lot of money for him to find on his wages, but in the end the doctor kept bringing it for her and not charging for it at all. So doctors weren’t just out for the money, there was a lot of kindness, too.’

  Dorothy was still only young during the war years, and does not have too many clear memories of the bombing or the impact of rationing, but ‘I can remember that there were no sweets,’ she says, ‘and to make the butter ration go a bit further, I can see my grandma now taking the cream off the top of the milk, putting it in a little jar and shaking it until she got a little piece of butter out of it.’ There was never any spare money and Christmas and birthdays were nothing like they are for kids now, though she is sure that she and her sister were just as excited on Christmas Eve as her own grandchildren are today. The two girls would hang up their stocking on Christmas Eve and they
might get one present in it, if they were lucky. There would be an apple or an orange and maybe a few nuts in the bottom, and that might be it for them until the next Christmas. ‘I would have loved a doll,’ Dorothy says, ‘but I never had one right through my childhood, not even a second-hand one, there just wasn’t the money to spare.’

  Things became even harder for Dorothy’s grandmother when her husband died. He had worked in the goods yards at the railway station all his life, except when he was fighting in the First World War. When war broke out again in 1939, it reduced him to near despair; the ‘war to end war’ that he had fought had merely led to another one, twenty years later. When the Germans bombed York in April 1942, the railway station was badly damaged and the stables where the horses were kept were set on fire. Dorothy’s granddad often worked with the horses and absolutely loved them. Although they were short of money and had little food to spare with wartime rationing, he was always sneaking out of the house with a few carrots or a couple of sugar lumps in his pocket, to feed to his favourite horses as treats. He was at work when the incendiary bombs hit the station and the stables caught fire. He could smell the stench of singeing horsehair as the wall of flames moved closer, and he and another man made frantic attempts to get the horses – big work horses, like shire horses – to safety, but they were terrified by the explosions, the smoke and the flames, and were running around, rearing up and lashing out with their hooves, and impossible to control. No matter what her granddad and the other man did, they could not get the horses out of the blazing stables and goods yard, and in the end every one of the horses at the station died. ‘He must have seen some awful sights in his time, especially when he was a soldier during the Great War, but losing the horses really, really got to my granddad,’ Dorothy says. ‘He was never the same man at all after that.’