Cobbled Streets and Penny Sweets--Happy Times and Hardship in Post-War Britain

by Yvonne Young

  I became increasingly interested in local sayings and their origins as I tuned in to their conversations:

  ‘These things are sent to try us’ – A particular favourite of Mam’s, which seemed to have a religious connotation.

  ‘He looks like the Wild Man of Borneo’ – I have no idea of the origins of this one, only that it had a similar meaning to Paddy’s Market.

  Also:

  ‘He looks like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards’

  None of them flattering, but a phrase which defies logic, usually said to children after some naughtiness, was: ‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face when I get my hands on you!’

  None of our neighbours had carpets, you were lucky if you had a rug in the centre of the floor. Lino or ‘oil cloth’ (some called it ‘Tarry toot’) with black bitumen in it was popular and cheap, although it cracked easily. Any old bits were used on the bonfire on 5 November – very dangerous stuff as it dripped red-hot and if any got on your skin, it left a scar. The dining table was usually set square in the middle of the room. Flypapers were fixed to the light fitting, if you had one, as bare bulbs were commonplace in Benwell due to the expense of buying lampshades. It was appalling to sit there eating food while numerous flies wriggled their last on the brown sticky surface. Curtains were strung up on a wire and a half-net from the middle of the sash window prevented nosy neighbours from ‘knowing your business’.

  The kitchen led into the backyard, where the tin bath lodged on a nail. When it rained, it was impossible to get a good night’s sleep for the continual plinking sounds. The outside toilet – ‘the netty’ – was next to the coal house: a hatch from the lane ensured that the coal man could deposit the family’s supply straight in there. The coal men hauled huge hessian sacks of the stuff over one shoulder from the lorry. A family down on their luck could buy a bucketful to keep them going, otherwise they would chop up the furniture during the winter. It was possible to ascertain whose dad worked for the Coal Board as a pyramid of the black gold was deposited outside their door in the lane. While outdoors toilets were usually whitewashed once a year, an extra-fastidious housewife would also whitewash the coal house.

  When the coal van arrived, mothers sent their children out:

  ‘Stand there and count the bags in!’

  I never understood why everyone did their washing on Mondays and placed it on long lines, criss-crossed over the lane. This was the day the coal van called so the women ran out with their props held aloft to allow it through. But woe betide any driver who didn’t give a warning and sailed straight through those white sheets. Angry females would beat the side of the lorry with their rolled-up sleeves. The women were also out in force if us kids decided on a game of ‘Run Through’. It was a great feeling to charge into the freshly laundered cotton and feel the flap on our faces. I wonder now how any of those women got any work done between attending to us and the coal men.

  According to Uncle Tom, Grandad cleared our coal house out and kept his racing pigeons in there. A wagon would call round, up and down the lanes, to pick up pigeons in their baskets to take to the yearly race. The baskets were taken to France where the birds were set free. Once a year, the local Homing Union held a show at the Town Hall, which was very much a social occasion for Grandad and men like him. On one occasion, me and a pal went further west along Edward Gardens to play with our box of chalks. We were well into drawing on the paving stones – a little house, some flowers, a sun with spokes of sunlight emanating from its orb – when an angry-looking man came raging up the walkway towards us.

  ‘You two have done this, haven’t you?’

  ‘What, Mister?’ I asked. ‘You’ve broken into my aviary and killed all my pigeons! You did it, didn’t you? Answer me!’

  We were scared, but I said, ‘We don’t know your pigeons.’

  At this he broke down and cried uncontrollably. Through his tears he murmured, ‘I know. I’m sorry, it wasn’t you, I can see that.’

  He turned on his heel and went off sobbing. It was well known that if a man had prize birds and could win the big prize money there might be someone who would want to take out the competition. A fancier called Reggie had an aviary like a little Roman Villa: it was on three sides, with little steps leading up to the fencing on all of them and even tiles on the roof. Most of the fanciers spent the majority of their time there and they also kept allotments on their site to grow vegetables. It was a standing joke if anyone asked when they could speak to a bird man.

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to be lucky to catch him at the aviary, he’s only there from eight in the morning until eight at night.’

  A big queue at the bus stop one Monday morning were treated to an amusing show when a wife was berating her husband in the queue. He was going to work that morning after being at his aviary all weekend, even sleeping there before an important competition.

  ‘Aye, you bugger, and you can stay out again tonight and forever because I’m changing the locks on the door!’

  Big money could be made from competitions among the working men. Leek clubs were popular, where men had secret recipes such as feeding Newcastle Brown Ale, as well as other organic matter, to their crops. Rhubarb was grown under a spare tin bath and some men were fortunate enough to have a plot at an allotment a couple of streets away from our house. At dusk, me and my pal Lillian climbed in there to grab a few stalks. It was a lovely experience to poke my nail into the top, drawing the skin the whole way down, a saucer full of sugar lined up to dip into and crunch away.

  Mam took on the task of wallpapering but couldn’t be bothered to match the patterns or cut off the white border. The sheets weren’t metered into the corner, instead, she curved the rolls around the four walls. This came in handy when I was in my cot as I could puncture little holes as far as my height would allow. A curious memory I have of this practice was when I imagined that I saw a little bear dancing in one of the holes. Time after time I returned but it never came back – I think I must have fallen asleep mid-poking.

  I remember holding Mam’s hand outside of what seemed like a giant double gate with a huge garden behind. A woman on the other side explained that children were not allowed (I was around four). Mam entered and I waited there until she came back. I have since discovered that this place was Little Sisters of the Poor in Elswick. Nuns ran a home for the elderly, supporting folks who could not afford care. Dad never visited her, his own mother. This was left to Mam. Her husband, grandad Charles, had passed away soon after the war, and she had had a hard life working to keep a home for eight children. She died at the age of sixty-eight, but as with so many people from that time, she looks decades older in photos I have seen of her.

  After Nana died, they kept the flat on and Mam took work at a factory. Dad was off to work at Adams and Gibbon garage on his pushbike and I was left in the bedroom until Sheila, Mam’s friend from up the street, called in to take me to her flat. One morning, I had woken and climbed up to the window, looking out onto the street. It was raining and I was crying, I don’t know how long for. Once at Sheila’s, much to my shame as I recall this, I lodged myself under her dining table, which had a crossbar linking the legs. Thoroughly enjoying myself, I shouted ‘Bugger!’ Furious, she tried to catch me as I hopped from one side to the other, shrieking with delight at her rage. She had a stutter, which made it all the more fun. When I was older, I was told that Sheila had answered a call to her front door, leaving her baby daughter in the cot. A fire had broken out and a neighbour came in the back way and took the child to safety. Sheila never got over the shock and this was how she developed her stutter.

  We never escape our memories and the guilt accompanying them.

  The cardboard box was always a source of delight to me. Dad’s wardrobe had a big metal key with ‘Tradecraft’ embedded in the bow. Access to the box was by way of climbing up the very useful cubbyholes meant for socks and ties, etc. Small photos with thick white borders showed Indian men wearing dhotis (
a traditional garment) and crouched down over clay pots and ornate archways and Uncle Alfie wearing his cream uniform and pith helmet. The Guide to Hindustani was used by my uncle during service but I was quite shocked at the phrases in there, which to me seemed a bit cheeky: ‘I have forgotten your name’, ‘Don’t make a noise’, ‘Get the hot bath ready’, ‘Bring me shaving water’ and even ‘This handkerchief is dirty, bring me another’. I couldn’t help but think, why didn’t they just do it themselves?

  There were a couple of medals and a small metal box containing a photo of a soldier, a bullet and a piece of striped ribbon. Dad sitting proudly on a howitzer gun, kissing a bronze statue of a naked woman, and lots of letters. Two were written in German from a woman called Edith. I couldn’t understand the language but there were lots of lovely drawings in the borders of horseshoes and bells. If fact, there were quite a few pictures of women – Alice, Fernanda… I wasn’t really interested in those.

  Mam’s wardrobe was where they kept my Easter eggs. Hers didn’t have cubbyholes so I used a chair to reach the top shelf. I took the silver paper from the eggs, ate the back and any chocolates inside, then replaced the paper as if everything was in order. Of course, I was only robbing myself.

  One Christmas holiday when I was five was a time to remember. Uncle Les came back from Singapore and brought lots of presents. I was given five dolls with rubber bodies and pot heads. By the end of the day, there were five headless bodies! Thumping from one room to another excitedly with a doll under each arm, negotiating the doorframes wasn’t my strong point. The adults were preoccupied – it was great to have Les home, but it was marred by the fact that Uncle Alfie had died, only in his twenties after contracting tuberculosis during his service in India, so he never came home.

  Among my gifts was a wishing well with a tiny bucket, which went up and down by turning a handle attached to string. Water was poured inside and I had endless fun. A marvellous oven appeared on the dining-room table, with real little tin pans and hollow rings, where some kind of spirit was poured and set alight. I could boil actual water! The drop-down door revealed a metal tray to put things inside. This was something else… only, there was another girl there getting in the way and she wanted to play with my oven. No way! I kept shoving her to get in first. Then it was time for this lass and her mother to leave – brilliant! But they were taking the gorgeous appliance with them. What was going on? Mam had a hell of a time explaining it belonged to the girl, whoever she was, and that they had only brought it to show me.

  Hmm…

  Another toy a pal owned which I always coveted was a Cinderella and Prince wind-up tin toy. When fully wound, the couple, arm in arm, circled around the floor. I never got one of those.

  * * *

  There was also an old lady nicknamed ‘Tickly Annie’ who lived a few doors up from us. On leaving her downstairs flat, she would turn the key, then bang and push the door for about five minutes. She would turn at the bottom of the path, go back and push, then pull a few times more. At the bottom of the street, Annie would look puzzled, then go back again to push a few more times. This went on until she finally left the street. On her return, if any bairns were hanging about, she either played a game called ‘Got Your Nose’, which involved nipping a child’s nose and holding her thumb in between her first two digits, or she would ‘tickle’ them by digging her bony fingers into their ribs. This caused much resentment from the older kids so Annie was usually the first target in a game of ‘Knocky Nine Door’ – basically knocking on someone’s front door, then running away.

  Her front room couldn’t be viewed from outside because of the huge plants filling the window frame. I was wandering past one day when I noticed a broom handle peering from above the leaves of the central plant. Unbeknown to me, some lads had just knocked on Annie’s door and run away. The broom handle sharply disappeared and she was at the open front door, eyes ablaze at me. Not a good sign! I took off down to my place but didn’t think to slam the door behind me. Instead, I opted to hide behind, with the door pulled towards me. Tickly Annie whacked her brush repeatedly as I cowered in the corner in fear of my life – she wasn’t intent on rib tickling that day. Dad was in, but he thought I was ‘only playing’.

  My friend Audrey took half a dozen bobbins of thread from her mother’s sewing box to use in a game of Knocky Nine Door. She trailed the thread across the road and fixed each thread to a letterbox, then went back across to hide behind a wall. Once hidden, she pulled and six knockers were sounded. Audrey then rolled her traps up. The women answered and all shared their puzzlement while Audrey chuckled in her hiding place. After staying there for some time, the coast was clear so she headed back home to replace the threads. But one of her victims had brought an item of clothing round to be altered by Audrey’s mother. The conversation got around to pesky kids who were disturbing the peace.

  ‘I know what I would do with them!’

  When the box was opened and the threads were discovered missing, Audrey’s mother shot a glance at her daughter standing there, hands behind her back. Having clicked that she was the culprit, she gave chase.

  It wasn’t only the women who were handy at making things. Dad often came in from the lane with something he had found. An old inner tube from a tyre would be used to heel our shoes on the cobbler’s last, a holding device shaped like a foot that is used to repair shoes. But some items were decidedly odd, such as a single flipper, which he spent a great deal of time cutting the ‘flip’ off.

  ‘Dad, what are you doing with that?’

  ‘I might find the other one and then I’ll have a pair of slippers.’

  This was run-of-the-mill stuff in our house but I soon picked up that my friends didn’t see it that way. If I asked any of them in, not wanting to commit themselves, they always asked, ‘Is your dad in?’ before agreeing to enter.

  Dad did actually use tyres for their specific purpose when he fixed a puncture on his bike. It would be upended in the sitting room with a bowl of water sat on the lino. He would slide the inner tube through to test for a release of air, then he knew where to fit the glue and patch.

  Mam was always off to visit her parents and brothers and sister at Gateshead, or else she was with her pal, Irene. Irene was a huge woman who batted the doors ajar with one hip and had a baby on the other. She had three sons who could never get a word in edgeways for her chatter, her husband was a quiet bloke who was a ‘clippy’ on the buses. Irene wasn’t good with the family finances and like Mam, she couldn’t cook for toffee. When the wage packet was handed over on Fridays, she always went to the nearest shop and bought bags of biscuits. People said her kids were ‘pasty-looking’. The baby would be propped up in his pram with reins on and given endless biscuits and bits of bread, which congealed on his legs and made a little carpet inside the pram. James, the middle child, stuffed a peanut up each nostril and it was ‘a devil to get them out’.

  We consumed a fair amount of biscuits too, the favourites being fig rolls, Jaffa Cakes and Garibaldi. Sometimes there would be Nice biscuits and there was always a debate on the correct pronunciation, as in ‘This is a nice cake’ or ‘I’m going to Nice for my holidays’. The selection was never deviated from. It was the same with cheese, either Cheddar or Cheshire. Only Cheshire never got its name, we called it ‘Crumbly’. Sterilised Puroh milk was always on the table – we didn’t own a fridge so the taste was disgusting, and there were floating slimy lumps in it.

  Often, we went on day trips to places like Blackpool with Irene, her husband and the boys. We took the usual egg-and-tomato sandwiches, which were always soggy by the time we arrived. Why did they never learn that this would happen and change the fillings? Still, I suppose it was a change from cheese! We also referred to them as ‘sand sandwiches’ as once our hands dipped in the yellow stuff, it was quickly transferred to food. Predictably, Dad went off on his own – he didn’t have friends, didn’t make any or want to either. The only time he engaged us in conversation was to complain
about any cold or flu symptoms he had. It was a standing joke between Mam and Irene, they laughed when they saw his sickbed routine and would cry, ‘Bring out your dead!’ at his performance.

  The Beechams Powders would appear, then he boiled bottled fizzy lemonade and added sliced fresh lemons to it. Vick was dolloped into a bowl of hot water. He then hid himself under a towel and when he surfaced, we had to listen to the analysis of who could have passed the cold on to him, where and how. Mam and Irene almost took to their beds trying to suppress their laughter. Dad’s head would also be in his Doctor’s Answers book. He tried Mam’s patience one day when he announced, ‘I think I’ve got typhoid.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, Ken! You wouldn’t be sitting there like that if you had.’

  ‘But the symptoms point to…’

  ‘Oh, bugger off, man!’

  It was no comedy when I first experienced Dad’s reaction to one of his ‘breathing attacks’. I was at home when he started clasping at his chest as if he was having a heart attack so I ran along to the family doctor’s surgery in Ethel Street. The housekeeper answered and said she would pass the message on. I was screaming that this was an emergency (I was to discover that there would be many ‘emergencies’ – usually when Dad couldn’t get his own way or there was something he couldn’t change). He would brood about it until he had a panic attack, or passed out. On this occasion, it was my mother’s social life – she was trying to have one, visiting her friends’ or relatives’ houses. When everything was going Dad’s way, we didn’t have the dramas, but we still heard the usual stories when he had a cold:

  ‘I could have got it from that woman on the bus who sneezed and didn’t cover her mouth.’

  Or:

  ‘It was probably that man who was blowing his nose in Marks & Spencer – I could have bought a tin that he touched.’

  And I didn’t escape: if I suffered a cold, Vick was shoved up my nose too and I was forced under the towel over a dish. I endured countless cups of boiled lemonade and was given liquid paraffin, Milk of Magnesia and cod liver oil, but I can’t say it turned me into a hypochondriac, thankfully.