Celebrating the New Year was a grand occasion. Parties would last a whole week. As children we would come downstairs on New Year’s morning and say to our parents: “A Happy New Year, the bottle a-stir, please will you give us a New Year’s gift”. We would get a piece of cake, a glass of ginger wine and a penny. What a treat we thought it.
You know we had no bedroom suites in those days. We had iron bedsteads all with comfortable feather beds, and big boxes with two strong iron handles, one on either side. The box had a lid. We called these ‘chests’. They were draped with pretty coloured cotton and on the top was a white honeycomb cover. On top stood a mirror. These chests held bed clothes or materials bought in the winter for summer wear and in the summer for winter wear. Mother was always ready.
Every place was scrupulously clean although sparse. We had a little basket chair with an antimacassar on the back tied with ribbon to match the paper in every bedroom. There was a lot of basket work in those days, like tables, chairs and plant, pot stands. We had them in our home. I remember when mother got her first carpet.
It was for the sitting room and was turkey red. We talked of nothing else but turkey red for months. From the living room door straight across the carpet to the front door was a long piece of white canvas patterned in turkey red along each side. This was ‘tracking’ to walk on to save the carpet. Then mother got a new green plush sitting room suite. A couch, two armchairs (one with arms and one without for father and mother) and four chairs. Buckingham Palace didn’t have a look in and neither did we, we weren’t allowed inside that room. The lace curtains were spread right across the floor beside the window and the basket work plant stand with a huge palm plant stood in pride of place right in the centre of the window space on top of the spread out curtains.
Then to crown it all mother got a piano, but she never had money to spare to pay for lessons. But we had Cousin Dolly who played well and in after years, two of my brothers were good players. But just to have a piano was a status symbol and standing on a turkey red carpet, with a green plush suite sent us high up the social ladder. When the turkey red carpet had to be lifted in the spring for cleaning, mother and father and my oldest brother would carry it down the garden and throw it over the wall into the cows field. They would spread it face down on the grass and then we would all dance on it to beat the dust out. Then some hefty boys would help to run up and down the field trailing the carpet behind them. This was the method used for cleaning carpets for we had no hoovers. It was great fun, I’ve seen the boys be far our over the field trailing the carpet behind them shouting and laughing. Cleaning a room had great technique in those days. The room was stripped bare for everything was carried across the front street into the garden. Suites were beaten and brushed with a short handled carpet brush. Everything was washed that could be washed. The walls were rubbed down with coarse towels and the ceiling whitened. The best lace curtains had been sent to the laundry. It was great day. These same curtains would last until the next spring cleaning.
I have just had my breakfast. I have had a slice of brown bread dipped in bacon fat which has sent me soaring again. I remember the big seven pound stone jar where mother saved every scrap of bacon fat. Indeed one could buy a big parcel of fat bacon ends from any grocer for a few coppers. When mother saw these on display in any grocer’s shop she would buy them, then rend them down’ in the oven and fill up the jar. We loved it on our bread for breakfast after our porridge. More especially did we like it on our yeasty cake. But mind you it wasn’t often you got it other than breakfast time. There was jam or treacle for tea and once a jar of jam was opened it had to be used up. Remember they were seven pound jars. I still have two of these jars in my house. Mother gave them to me when I married forty-seven years ago.
How lovely to sit and recall all these things. One seems to recall all the good, for if there was any bad it was safely hidden from us.
On the days when mother made big tins of hot pot in the oven, she would boil large suet puddings and we would have these with treacle on for dessert. Mother reckoned this was the greatest health giver one could have. If we had a boiled pudding like an onion pudding or meat pudding, we had rice for dessert plus meat puddings. They were boiling in a great big pan when we set off for school.
Mother reckoned three hours for a meat pudding. We had to have our meals in relays, because there was never plenty of room for all to sit down altogether. Do you know I can even remember when father and mother ate from the one plate like Jack Sprat and his wife. What a long time ago it seems. I reckon it will be nearly seventy. Well another break until something else jogs my memory.
Perhaps you will find this boring but at least I have enjoyed myself. I remember the Spotty Dicks mothers used to make. These were suet puddings with currants and sultanas in and were eaten with white sauce. Mother used to say she would have to make a pail full of white sauce to satisfy us. It was the same with rabbits. Mother used to make rabbit and spare rib pies.
There was always a row about who should have the leg that week. You got it last time. No I didn’t I got the ribs. You didn’t cos I always get the ribs and so it’s my turn. Mother would say “you forget it’s a rabbit and not a spider”. We all liked broth and what broth it was. I can still see mother with the long handled ladle dishing out the soup as thick with vegetables and barley as it was possible. On the first day we had the soup and dumplings on the next day she would boil some potatoes to eke out the broth that was left and cut up the shank and boiling meat which had made the broth.
There was more socialism practised in those days then there is now. Parents helped the young married couples by letting them have a room, which they furnished for them. Things were given by all relatives and nothing was too old. Parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins all helped out; when parents grew old their families looked after them. My mother had little to spare but she would send a yeasty cake and a tea cake each week for Grandmother (Ganny we called her) and for my father’s Aunt Annie of whom I have already spoken. Then every pay weekend she sent them each a quarter of tea.
Her brother called on his way from work every Wednesday tea-time and got a good meal and a yeasty cake to take away with him plus a teacake. He was separated from his wife and lived alone in one room in Sunderland. Of course old people did not get the pensions that we get now. We do not need that kind of help now and we have better health now than they had at a much younger age. But then women were considered old as soon as they passed child bearing age and were treated as old people. Now at 73 I cannot think that I am old. I was amused the other night to hear the paper boy shout to his assistant “put one in the bottom door where that ad wife lives”. “Ad wife” and only 73! But seriously life is drawing to a close, but I cannot grumble, I shall still enjoy the remaining years, and still look back with nostalgia on all that have gone before.
I remember when I was about eight, at one of mother’s New Year’s parties, a man was there called Ben. He made a great fuss of me; you see I had beautiful fair hair. I could sit on it and he was fascinated with it. Childlike I thought he was great and said to myself ‘I’ll marry a man called Ben’. Wasn’t it strange that I did do just that and I have come to the conclusion that all Bens are great.
I only know of one new coat bought for 5/- at the dividend sale at the Co-op for my mother. This was the coat she wore on the famous trip to Stockton. She always wore a fur cape handed down from her mother, a relic of their better days. She used a fur muff to match. This muff served as a handbag as well. For ordinary wear she had a big grey shawl. Father had a navy blue suit. It was the only suit he ever had to my knowledge, brushed and put carefully away for better days only. So clothes did not present a major problem. Mother used to say our feet were her greatest worry. We wore high boots in the winter; sometimes they were buttoned up the side nearly to the knee. One could always find a shoe horn and button hook hanging at the side of the fireplace. Sometimes we had high boots which fastened up the front by criss crossing laces on studs. These were called rinking boots. Mother spent the maximum on footwear, because she said all ailments stem from cold neglected feet.
We had a long brass line hung above the fireplace on which towels were always drying. In a big family like ours it was a problem to keep towels dry for use. There were tea towels, coarse towels and face towels constantly in use. But one had to take great care in hanging them on the brassline as they were apt to slide off and into the fire. We never had our chimneys swept. They were always fired at night when no one’s clothes were hanging out to dry. Mother used to say if you used a blazer to blaze your fire first thing, you never needed a sweep. Every household had a blazer made in the blacksmith’s shop at the colliery. These were big sheets of metal made to fit into the fireplace. They were blackleaded and usually had a brass handle firmly attached. This and the lid of the boiler matched. These things were free if you could get round the blacksmiths. It was the same at the Bottleworks. Many beautiful things were blown at these works by the glass blowers but their main production was all kinds of glass bottles. I loved to look on the shelves of the little chemists shop at the top of Church Street. It was a pokey little place in my young days and was called the Beehive and was owned by old Mr Storey. There were fancy shaped bottles of all sizes and colours. We used to go regularly for 3d worth of paregoric and nitre for father’s bad chest. Mother used to have big dishes of black Spanish cut up into pieces steeping in syrupy water. We as little children used to try to pick out pieces of the Spanish but they were too slippery. We used to be dosed with orange and quinine wine to prevent colds and physiced with Epsom salts and lemon in the spring time. All these things were homemade. You must by now realise how busy our mothers were all through the years. The running out and emergencies.
Ah! I must tell you of the wreck of the butter boat. It was before my time but was a constant topic of conversation. Evidently one very stormy night a Danish boat was in trouble just off Seaham Harbour. It was beaten against the rocks and badly damaged. Barrels of butter were washed ashore and the inhabitants of Seaham Harbour swooped like locusts. Best butter for breakfast, dinner, tea and supper. The people couldn’t get over it and all had a glorious time. The police, which were very few in number, couldn’t do anything about it. We never tired of hearing about it and our parents never tired of recalling it. All kinds used to be washed up on the Blast Sands. Father once came strolling home with a huge enamel kettle and I mean huge. There was nothing wrong with it, of course father kidded the neighbours it was to be used at a big party, but we used it as a watering can. We had to water the garden and it was common thing to ‘water the doors’ that meant the back street. Mother had a thing about ‘laying the dust’. Before sweeping the parlour carpet we sprinkled damp the leaves, saved for the purpose, on the carpet ‘to lay the dust’ then with a short carpet brush and a dustpan the carpet was swept. Everything was utilised or hoarded in those days, because things were passed on from generation to generation.
On winter nights we stitched multicoloured patches together and mother would criss cross them by machine onto old blankets to make quilts for the beds. They were very gay and very warm. It was a great treat to get a bundle of patches from friends who were dressmakers. As a very little girl I used to love to get a shoe box and make it into a doll’s bed with a clothes peg for a doll. I would use some of the patches to dress the doll and the bed. But we had always to take the needle to mother for her to put into the pin cushion so that she was sure it was not lost amongst the clippings of the mats.
My goodness how ignorant we were in those days. Our world consisted of English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish people, of whom many lived together. We thought the waters that washed our shores stretched away across the world where the black people lived and that we were far removed from these races. Of the continent we learned nothing so you can image what a narrow but safe little world we lived in. I remember black men coming into our port, and sometimes lived with white women, but they were always talked of as kind and gentle people. One woman mother knew married a black man and mother used to say he made a far better husband than many white men she knew. But then mother’s motto was ‘look for the good in people and your task will be easier and pleasanter than searching for the bad’. If we told tales, detrimental tales, about other children she would sat “sit down now and think hard, have you never done that same thing”. If we liked playmates but called their parents mother would say “don’t despise the tree if you like the fruit”. She was great with ‘sayings’ always found one to fit the occasion.
I spent my childhood teaching the walls in the backyard. One big bump in the very uneven walls was the big dunce in my class at school. I used to hammer him hard and father would say “God help the dunces in the class if she was the teacher”. When father was finished with his pigeons he cleaned and whitewashed the ducket and said I could have it for my school. He made me a blackboard and easel, a blackboard rubber and a cane (very important in those days) and pitmen always had chalk in their pockets to mark the tubs, so I was set. Mother would say “you never have far to search for her”. I would go round the streets and pick up all the hairpins that had been shaken off the mats and put up my hair. I would find safety pins and join them end to end to make a chain to lift up my skirts. These chains were worn by ladies to lift their long skirts out of the muddy streets. My long skirt was one of mother’s underskirts.
Children have always liked to dress up. You see mats were lifted and shaken outside the back doors every day and all kinds of things dropped from then. If it was anything like a brooch it was returned to the people, we would never have considered keeping anything like this. We would have felt great shame in such a small community. Remember ‘honesty is the best policy’. ‘See a pin, pick it up, all the day, you’ll have good luck’. This was a rhyme we all knew. As children we firmly believed in it and so many pins dropped from the mats we were hard put to think of our good luck during the day. But childlike we kidded ourselves. Mesmerism – that was a thing much talked of at one part of my childhood and a young girl living in our street told us she was a medium. S
he had to stand up against a wall whilst another playmate moved his hands backwards and forwards before her eyes. When she swooned she was in a trance. We all ran but when she caught a victim he or she had to do as he was told. Mind you she had sense enough to order childish things – take your dress off and dance a jig, go and put your head under the tap, knock on no 24. But when she ordered me to go and ask mother for a penny she had gone too far. Neither I nor any of us would have dared to ask for such a thing for ourselves, but you see we were under her influence. She soon lost this influence where mother went after her and our family was expelled from the trances. What you will believe when you are young.
We had five brothers and then Jack Blake. You had to be tough to live amongst them. Then my oldest sister married and came home to have her first child. It was a boy. How my brothers loved him, so much so that after about two years old he would not go home. He would be away into the boys’ bed waiting for them to come home. Shrieks of laughter would come from the room, because he would be in the middle and the others would crowd him in. Then someone would shout turn and they all had to turn over. Someone was bound to fall out and this went on until they were all exhausted. They were noisy exhausting but happy days. Beds then had straw mattresses. Straw strung tightly together and covered in coarse hair, and about 4 to 6 ins in depth were the foundation. Mother had feather beds on top which were very warm and comfortable but this was the exception rather than the rule. Some people used to use mats to give warmth in the winter, or overcoats, these because they could not afford blankets. I have known families go to bed in the clothes they wore all day just to keep themselves warm, but in later years I could not understand this. The men all worked at the colliery and the differences in pay were very slight. We had one of the biggest families in the Cottages and only one of my brothers of working age, yet we lived so much better. There was only one explanation, mother’s ingenuity. Mind you there were others as well off, but most had smaller families.