My 40's Childhood

My Grandparents, Ada and Charlie, lived in a council house unlike any council house I've seen since.  In fact I think that 11 Broom Crescent might even be considered a rather ‘des.res.’ nowadays in Salford 6.  Anyway, it seems in my memory to have been more spacious than the house I called home at No 3 Russell Road.  However, my parents must have been very proud of their new home, which I think they may have saved up and paid for before marriage.  I believe it cost all of £400; about two and a half years pay for my father, who was earning £3.00 a week when I was born.  Anyway, they had picked out the site and watched it grow among the neat rows of the new estate sprouting out of an area of sand hills on the edge of Salford.  I knew about the sand hills under the estate because when we went to the local shop in Hayfield Lane, (how is it I remember that so clearly? Yes, I know, we once took the train to Derbyshire and got off at Hayfield, a happy memory of walking in the hills when I was five with Dad and Mum and her friend.)  Anyway, at Hayfield Lane were the sand hills that all the kids of the neighbourhood loved to play in.  I only had the opportunity to play there briefly when my mother took me to the shop.  You see, I was a nice little girl and didn't play with the ‘other kids’.

I remember the shop so clearly, I could be standing there now amidst the wonderful aroma of a typical grocery store filled with unwrapped goods filling my nostrils.  Watching the grocer in his white apron and hat expertly wield two wooden butter pats to form neat pats of butter and fold them neatly into greaseproof paper.  Transfixed as his buxom lady assistant carefully poured sugar into a white paper cone, carefully folding over the top, and the same with a quarter pound of tea.  All carefully weighed on big brass scales with polished pans suspended and balanced with brass weights marked in ounces up to pounds.  Sides of bacon, taken down from a large hook on the ceiling and placed on the gleaming bacon slicer.  “How thick would you like it madam?”  Their whole existence was to serve and the customer was always right!  Our world revolved around polite manners and good service.


Our home, a small but stylish semi, was a step up the ladder for this newly married pair.  The window in the Hallway depicted a ship in full sail in stained glass.  As far as I remember, the front room was furnished with a novel settee that turned into a dining table and an easy chair that turned into a single bed.  It’s no wonder that I've also had a fondness for multipurpose furniture.  The hall led into the narrow kitchen with under stairs larder, gas cooker and sink, then to the back door and washroom with big galvanised tub, heated by gas, and obligatory washboard and mangle.  Come rain or shine, Monday was Washday.  Beds were changed and the strenuous ritual of washing and scrubbing, rinsing and wringing seemed to go on most of the day.  In good weather, very soon sheets and towels billowed on the line strung across the garden.  When raining, the house would be filled with the peculiar smell of damp laundry drying off in the washroom; the heavy linen sheets festooned over a large wooden clotheshorse and indoor clotheslines. 
The back living room, also my playroom, looked out onto the garden where Dad built trellis and laid winding crazy paving paths between flowerbeds.  When the war started, along with everyone else, he and our next-door neighbour Mr Savage dug out an Air Raid Shelter, (subject to periodic flooding) furnished with rudimentary Bunk beds and roofed in corrugated iron covered by a rockery.  As soon as wailing sirens alerted us to an air raid I would be wrapped in blankets and carried into this structure along with the Savage’s daughter Barbara who was also my age, and tucked up safely while planes thundered overhead and bombs dropped onto the city.  The sulphurous smell of a striking match can still evoke the hazy memory of lighting candles in the musty darkness of that tiny shelter.  There was a hole in the middle of our small lawn that I was convinced was a bomb crater.  At least that’s what I told everyone although I really don’t know what it was.
Up the stairs was a tiny box room, bathroom and two large bedrooms, the back one that was mine looking out over Salford, as our house stood on top of a hill.  I noticed this only when we returned home after the war, having spent most of four years in the country.  I was then seven years old and stood at the window, looking in horror at the rooftops stretching away to the horizon wailing… ‘Where’s the country?’

As I write these memoirs from so many years ago, I send them out to anyone who may appreciate the flavour of a world that has mostly gone... and I'd love to read any comments you feel moved to leave here!