The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  Arthur and Alice had been married for fifty-two years when he died in 2001. ‘In all, he had lived for fifty-seven years totally blind,’ Eileen says, ‘so he never saw Alice’s face, nor my husband’s, nor our children – his grandchildren – but Dad was a happy man and he never let his blindness get him down.’ Eileen was sixty-five when he died, and her dad was eighty-seven, but even then, she says, ‘I never, ever answered him back. You just didn’t do it. If I said, “I don’t think you’re right, Dad,” he’d just say, “I know I’m right.” And I’d end up saying, “Well, maybe you are, Dad.” You’d go around it somehow, because you just didn’t argue with him. It was worse in his younger days because he really did have an awful temper then, and he went through a stage when he first came home after the war when I think he really couldn’t handle being blind and that came out in his temper, but, despite that, he was a remarkable man and I loved him dearly.’

  When Arthur died, a St Dunstan’s visitor came and talked to Alice, Eileen and the family, and offered the organization’s help, and she was there at the funeral, too. The collection taken at Arthur’s funeral was donated to St Dunstan’s (now called Blind Veterans UK) and Eileen supports and fundraises for them to this day, in gratitude for the help that the charity gave to her father and his family all those years ago. ‘They were so good to him,’ she says, ‘and they are a wonderful, wonderful organization.’

  At the time of Arthur’s death, Alice was already suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s and, Eileen says, ‘Alice just couldn’t cope with it. I wanted her to come and stay with me but she wouldn’t do it and stayed in their house. It was only fifty yards away round the corner from me and I used to go in and see her two or three times a day, but she died only fifteen weeks after my dad. I think she just couldn’t live without him. You hear of people dying of a broken heart and I think that’s what killed her.’

  13

  Maureen

  Maureen Graham started work at Rowntree’s on her fifteenth birthday in April 1959, and it was, she says, ‘the longest day of my life. It was awful. I was a skinny little thing, the overall was far too big for me, the turban practically covered my eyes so I couldn’t see what I was doing, and even worse, I was wearing a pair of white ankle socks.’ As she joined the jostling crowds of women making their way into work that morning, she realized that there were about 6,000 women at the factory and 5,999 of them, from the youngest girls to the women approaching retirement, were all wearing stockings. The only one in the entire workforce who was wearing ankle socks was Maureen. She was a shy girl, who had grown up in a small farming village fifteen miles outside York, and the ways of the ‘big city’ were new to her. ‘I was a country lass and didn’t know any different,’ she says. She never wore ankle socks again, going bare legged until she could afford to buy a pair of stockings herself. They were expensive and easily laddered, but there were several shops then where you could get damaged stockings mended invisibly.

  Maureen had been allocated to Smartie Packing and the overlooker there set her to work packing tubes of Smarties into outers with two older girls in charge of her. Maureen was completely overawed and intimidated by them and was all fingers and thumbs as she struggled to put the tubes into the boxes at anything approaching the speed of the experienced girls alongside her. After struggling for a couple of hours, desperate for a brief respite, she asked the senior girls if they would mind if she went to the toilet. That was normally forbidden outside the official break times, but they told her to ‘go ahead and take your time about it’. However, Maureen suspects that it was more an act of desperation than kindness and still shudders at the memory. ‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘I think they were glad to be rid of me, because I was so slow and clumsy to start with that I must have been holding them up and costing them money. It was all so new to me, it was physically hard work and it was a very long day for someone who, after all, was still just a kid and fresh out of school.’

  When they got to the official break time, there was always a rush for the toilets. The rules had not changed over the years; girls were still not allowed food on their work tables, so if they wanted something to eat at break time, they either had to eat it sitting on the floor or they had to go downstairs to the room where they kept their coats. Then, as soon as they had finished eating, they had to dash to the toilets and be back in time to start work as soon as the machines started running again, or risk falling behind with their work.

  Maureen absolutely hated the work and the factory at first. She had actually wanted to be a nurse but her mother wouldn’t let her apply. When Maureen asked her why, she said, ‘Because you’re too squeamish. You won’t make a nurse. You’ll get married and have babies.’ Maureen has always regretted and resented that, and later felt more than a tinge of understandable anger that while her mother refused to allow her to train as a nurse, she gave her blessing to Maureen’s youngest sister to do so. Now, as Maureen says, ‘I’m on my own and I could do with a job that pays a bit of money,’ her regret at that missed opportunity is still strong, though she consoles herself with the thought that ‘I think I’ve had a better life than my youngest sister despite that – well, certainly a more colourful one anyway!’

  Alone in her room, Maureen cried herself to sleep that first night, and if she could have found a way to avoid going back to work the next day, she would have grabbed it with both hands. ‘I’d lived a very sheltered life as a country girl with very strict parents,’ she says. ‘I’d been raised to say my prayers each night, never to tell lies and to go to Sunday School every Sunday. I was brought up really straight-laced, I couldn’t even talk to boys, and I was still only a child, just fifteen years old. People now wouldn’t think of sending children off to work at that age, they wouldn’t let them do more than a Saturday job, but things were different then and I had no choice but to get on with it.’

  She was skilled enough with a needle and thread to take in her overalls and turban so that they fitted her better, and she donated her ankle socks to her younger sister Shirley, who was to undergo the same ‘ankle sock trauma’ when she started work at Rowntree’s eighteen months later. Either Maureen had forgotten to warn her, or perhaps she wanted her younger sister to suffer like she had!

  At half past seven the next morning, Maureen was back at her work station and, as she got used to it, the work slowly became easier. However, what had already been a traumatic introduction to the world of work became even more so when the excitement of receiving her first ever wage packet – two pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence (forty-four pounds today) for her forty-four hour week – rapidly turned to despair when, as she left the factory that night, she realized she had lost her wage packet somewhere in the maze of corridors and buildings. She retraced her steps but could not see it anywhere, and when she reported the loss to the wages office, she received sympathy but no offers of compensation. Distraught and still in floods of tears at having undergone that bruising first week for nothing, she was sitting on a bench in the entrance lobby when a woman from the wages office hurried down the corridor towards her holding a brown paper packet in her hand. ‘You’re in luck,’ she said. ‘Someone found it and handed it in.’ Maureen was so relieved and elated that she could almost have kissed her.

  Maureen was born in 1944, while the Second World War was still raging. Her parents both served in the war, her father fighting with one of the Scottish regiments, while her mother was a WREN, and like so many other children then, she had been looked after by her grandparents while her parents were away. The oldest of five children, three girls and two boys, Maureen lived with her parents in a three-bedroom terraced council house in a little village called Hayton, three miles outside Pocklington. It was an idyllic childhood, for their house was surrounded by open country, and Maureen and her brothers and sisters would be out playing in the fields and woods from dawn to dusk, searching for birds’ nests, looking for frogs and newts in the streams and muddy drainage ditches, and foraging for wild strawb
erries, gooseberries, blackberries, rosehips and sloes in their seasons. At weekends, as soon as the sun was up she would take a basket and pick mushrooms in the pasture and the fringes of the woods. When she got back, her mum or grandmother would check them carefully to make sure she had not picked any toadstools and then fry the mushrooms up for their breakfast.

  The children had a pet dog with the unlikely canine name of Roger. It was a pure-bred collie and might have been a valuable sheep dog, but the farmer who had bred it had fired a shotgun near it when he was training the dog and had frightened it so much that it became useless as a working dog. The farmer might well have used his next cartridge on the dog, but Maureen’s uncle, who worked at the farm, offered to take it off the farmer’s hands. His mother, Maureen’s grandmother, had the dog for a while, but ‘my granny got bored with him’, she says. ‘She got bored with everything after a while and things she got bored with often finished up in a hole in the garden.’ So her grandchildren inherited the dog. They kept Roger for years and took him to York with them when they moved there some years later.

  The children were very much thrown on their own resources when they played in the house or outside, but Maureen cannot remember ever feeling bored as a child. She was a voracious reader, even though in that small village, miles from the nearest library and with no money to buy books, she could never get enough reading material. She spent a lot of her time drawing pictures, playing cards with her brothers and sisters, and making up games that they could play. The family didn’t own a television until Maureen had grown up and gone to work at Rowntree’s, and even then she barely watched television until after she got married.

  Although the family was poor, they always managed to scrape enough money together to pay for a holiday every year. Maureen’s mum had never been on holiday when she was growing up and she was determined that her children would not miss out in the same way. One year they were going to have to cancel the holiday because, with three weeks to go, they just did not have enough money to cover the cost, but Maureen’s dad had entered a competition in one of the newspapers. ‘The first prize was a radiogram and it was something we kids would have loved,’ Maureen says, ‘because we used to have to smuggle the family radio upstairs, plug it into the light and hide under the blankets with it to listen to Radio Luxembourg. If mum and dad had had a radiogram, they could have listened to it and we could have had the other radio all to ourselves. However, Dad didn’t win that radiogram but he did win fifty pounds in cash instead and that was enough to save our holiday, though to be honest we’d have preferred to have stayed home and won the radiogram instead!’

  After she left school and started work, in order to get to the Rowntree’s factory every day, Maureen had to cycle to Pocklington, catch a bus into York and then another bus out to the factory. That not only extended her already long working day by another two hours, but as winter arrived and the weather deteriorated, she could no longer even be certain of getting to work on time. Rowntree’s insisted on punctuality from all their employees and there were severe financial penalties for lateness. Workers who were even slightly late for the 7.30 a.m. start still found that the factory doors had been shut and they would lose their entire morning’s pay. Faced with that prospect, Maureen had no option but to move into digs, renting a bedsit in a house just over the railway bridge from the factory, and from then on she only went back to the family home at Hayton at weekends.

  Her room was on the top floor and the smell of boiled cabbage always seemed to drift up the stairs from the family’s ground-floor kitchen. Maureen had just the one room, with cracked lino on the floor, a small fireplace, a bed, a tiny table in an alcove and two hard chairs. With no wardrobe space, she had to keep her spare clothes in her suitcase under the bed, not that she owned many clothes. There was a bathroom on the floor below, but if she wanted to take a bath she had to pre-book it with her landlord and pay an extra sum for the hot water she used.

  She had lived in the country all her life until then and didn’t know a single soul in York, so it was a miserable, lonely existence at first. There was very little tourism in York in those days, and it was an insular, provincial city with a reputation for being an unfriendly sort of place, compared to the warmth of towns and cities elsewhere in Yorkshire. To an outsider like Maureen, it seemed as if everybody was related to everybody else or knew everybody else, and had grouped themselves into cliques of which she was no part.

  However, she slowly began to make some friends in the Smarties department and from then on, instead of dreading it, she actually started looking forward to going to work, though she still absolutely hated living in digs. It cost her ten shillings a week to be a lodger in an upstairs room in somebody else’s house, and though in theory she was free to use the kitchen, in practice she had to pass through the family’s living room to reach it and was so shy and so reluctant to intrude on their lives that she never made use of it. Instead she stayed in her room and lived on sliced white bread and the jars of Cheese Whiz – a thick, processed cheese spread – that her mother sent her. Thankfully Cheese Whiz did not make up her entire diet, and for her main meal she ate a hot, three-course lunch – soup, meat and two veg, and a steamed pudding – in the Dining Block at Rowntree’s every day. The food had always been subsidized by the company and remained very good value at around half a crown (twelve and a half pence) a week – the same price that Maureen’s school dinners had been.

  At first, in the evenings, curled up in her room, she listened to pop music on Radio Luxembourg, continually adjusting the dial to try to get a stronger signal as it was often barely audible among the haze of static and competing foreign language stations. Her landlord had lent her the radio, and when it fell silent one night she assumed that she had broken it. She was too timid to tell him and from then on she sat in her room in silence. Only much later, after she had moved out of her digs, did she realize that it was actually a battery-operated radio and all that had happened was that the batteries had gone flat. That was how naive and innocent she was in those early days. Even after she had left home, her parents, and particularly her mother, continued to have a strong and occasionally overpowering influence on their daughter. However, like many other children of strict upbringing, when the parental controls were lifted, the first tastes of freedom could be dizzying and were sometimes embraced with a headlong, reckless enthusiasm, whatever the consequences. Maureen was now getting ready to make up for lost time.

  She was still only fifteen when she started going out with her first boyfriend, Peter, who worked at the Co-op Dairy down the road from the factory. They met at a dance and their first date was at the Odeon cinema. She cannot remember what film was playing, but then, as she says with one of her trademark wicked grins, ‘We were in the back row, so I didn’t see much of the film!’ He was three years older than her and a ‘rocker’, with blue jeans, black leather jacket and a BSA Gold Flash motorbike. Although crash helmets were available then, few self-respecting motorcyclists and certainly no rockers would have been seen wearing one, and Maureen used to ride pillion on Peter’s motorbike with her long hair flying in the wind behind her. He drove a Co-op van during the working day and would sometimes pick Maureen up in it and take her for a spin at lunchtime, though she had to sit on the floor and keep her head down until they got out of York because he would have been sacked if he had been caught taking passengers in the van.

  Peter was a huge rock ’n’ roll fan and had seen Bill Haley during his 1957 tour of Britain, when Haley’s brand of rock ’n’ roll had fans jiving in the aisles and the self-appointed guardians of British morals frothing at the mouth. Maureen wasn’t a Haley fan – she thought he looked less like a rock god and more like an overweight, kiss-curled salesman at a plumbing supplies convention – but like most girls of her age, she worshipped Elvis and she loved to go jiving. Most Saturday nights Peter would take Maureen to one of the local dances, and though they would sit out the waltzes and foxtrots, as soon as a rock ’n’ roll
song started, he would pull her to her feet and out onto the dance floor and they would jive, her skirt whirling out as he spun her around. However, she says, ‘One of my most abiding memories of my relationship with Peter is the number of pairs of earrings I went through. I have pierced ears and every time I went out with him, I seemed to lose an earring because he always wore pullovers and my earrings would keep catching in them.’

  After a few weeks in Smartie Packing, Maureen was beginning to match and even exceed the speed of the experienced workers and she found it a lovely department to work in. There was very little noise in the days before it was all mechanized. In other departments the girls could barely hear themselves think for the din of the machines, but in Smartie Packing, ‘it was nice and quiet,’ she says. ‘You could have a conversation with your workmates without shouting your head off to make yourself heard. We did different jobs all the time as well, which made the work much less monotonous. As well as packing, we did wrapping, and all sorts of other jobs, and in spring and in early winter we would sometimes go upstairs and do Easter eggs or Christmas specialties as well. We did Smarties eggs, but there were also small chocolate ones that we packed in a kind of egg box, just as if they were fresh eggs.’

  She ate lunch in the Dining Block with her friends every day, and after they had eaten they would go downstairs and watch a film or go dancing for twenty minutes before it was time to go back to work. They danced to rock ’n’ roll music, wearing skirts they’d made themselves out of a yard of material, with layer upon layer of petticoats under their skirts that would spin out as they danced.