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

by Yvonne Young

  I went into a room where a fella sat at the table: he looked like a doctor but I was highly suspicious when he asked me to take my top off. He sat on a chair and I was standing in front of him. Wasn’t he going to take my height and weight, maybe a blood test, an eye test too? He felt my breasts, then asked me to take my knickers off and lie sideways on the bed. He flicked his fingers on my parts twice, then asked me to get dressed. The next lass to go in was in the waiting room and she had huge tits – I was taking the bet that she would be in there longer than me with my fried eggs.

  My hearing was to be tested by another ‘doctor’ in the next room. A short balding man with glasses perched on the end of his nose and of a nervy disposition, he pushed cotton buds up my nostrils, to which I obviously shouted out in pain. He laughed hysterically and repeated this half a dozen times. What this had to do with my hearing, I will never know.

  The last person I was introduced to was a female officer. I was decidedly uncomfortable with her as she was looking me up and down so I decided not to take this up as a career.

  The lad from the club, however, did sign up and Lena, Joan, Catherine and me went to see him off at the station, with his uniform on and a long roll of a case over his shoulder. We all promised to write. He came back on leave a couple of months later and said he hated it – he missed the club and drinking in his local, the Chesterfield. Soon after, he bought himself out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Last Will and Testament

  My pal Jean worked in the rag trade at a huge company called Levine’s on Scotswood Road. During the summer I had six weeks’ break from college and could still go to our lunchtime dance sessions, but Jean was now restricted to a week’s holiday. She asked me one day to ring in to her workplace with an excuse.

  ‘Hello, I’m calling on behalf of Jean Clark. She won’t be in today as her grandmother died.’

  ‘I thought her grandmother died last month!’ came the reply.

  I became flustered and didn’t know what to say next so I put the receiver down.

  Jean took me into the factory one day. I couldn’t hear myself speak, the noise from the clatter of the machines was deafening – this wouldn’t be for me. I had considered becoming a nurse but realised that I wouldn’t be able to stick a needle into anyone so that idea was out too. I heard they use an orange to practise on as it’s a similar texture to skin – no, thanks! But it was the sixties and jobs were easy to get. Teenagers walked into a job for a week, decided it wasn’t for them and took on another the next. I would go for interviews, accept the job, change my mind over the weekend and accept another, ready to start the following week.

  Much to my shame I recall a little solicitor’s office in Jesmond, where I kept an appointment at 4.30 on a Friday. The room was very dark and dingy, the only sound from a grandfather clock ticking in the corner. There was an ancient iron fireplace and a musty smell of old newspapers. The interview went well and they offered me the job as an office junior on the spot to start the following Monday.

  ‘For your first task, I have a pile of letters for other applicants to sign and you can post them. It’s to inform that the position has now been filled and to thank them for their time visiting us.’

  When I left the building, I knew that I couldn’t go back there, a leafy street, nothing else around, no shops nearby. Why had I said I would take it? I should have scrapped the letters and rang them at the beginning of the week to say that I couldn’t start, then they could have picked the next girl on the list, but I didn’t. I posted them and didn’t consider that they would have to advertise all over again.

  My first position in town was second sales assistant for Timpson’s Shoes in the Haymarket – it was roughly where the entrance to Marks & Spencer is now. Linda was a little older than me, skinny, hardly smiled and spoke slowly as she peered through long wavy hair. There were two Daves who worked in the back of the shop: Dave One was in his fifties, deaf and used sign language, Dave Two was in his twenties. One day, I was trying to understand what Dave One wanted for his lunch as he flapped his arms; I didn’t get it. Dave Two interpreted this as ‘Fly cake’ – I wouldn’t have got it anyway as round our way it was called ‘Sly cake’. I felt a little guilty until I saw him point at me then cup his hands over his chest. I asked Dave Two, ‘What did he say?’

  ‘She’s got fried eggs!’

  The shop was becoming very busy, so the manager took on another sales assistant. She was assigned shopping for lunches and snacks, but every day she brought back treats for us – sweets, cake, that kind of thing. It was kind of her, but in the end we had to politely refuse.

  An American lady swaggered into the place one day, plonked a shoe on the counter and a heel beside it: ‘I want you to stick this little heel on here, just like that!’ It was the first time I had heard such an accent and I was totally taken with her. Butlins at Clacton-on-Sea and Bognor Regis was my idea of foreign and luxurious. We gazed at her, dressed all in cream: coat, hat with a diamond-style pin, gigantic bag and matching shoes. Dave Two said she could pick it up in fifteen minutes. When she returned, she mentioned that she was interested in a shoe dye. The new lass jumped straight in, offering her a range of colours. To demonstrate the colour she opened a bottle, lost her grip and it bounced from the counter, projecting black dye over our customer’s face, coat, hat, bag and shoes. There was hell on! The manager was called. He offered free dry cleaning and she could choose shoes and a bag from our shop. She refused and was taken into the staffroom, where ‘a solution was reached’ but we weren’t informed of what that was.

  Money was going missing from the till, coat pockets and purses. As the new member of staff was the only one who had not raised this with the manager, he took action. We were told not to go into the staffroom. He sent her to pick something up – he had crumbled a bit of Reckitts Crown Blue Block into a purse and a few shillings inside as a decoy. He stood outside the room and waited until he heard the tap go on. He found her scrubbing the dye from her fingers and she was sacked on the spot. Poor lass was only trying to fit in, and she was in floods of tears as she left.

  We did have other colourful characters to serve. Vivian, a well-known gay icon in Newcastle who ran the Imperial pub, famous for its shepherd’s pies, paid regular visits, trying to squash his size tens into stilettos. Lads told us that he had glued a coin to the floor of the pub so that he had a good view of any fella bending over. While I worked at Timpson’s, all of three months, my wages financed outings to the Majestic dance hall. (I love to see the young kids who go there today, sitting on the path all around the building, waiting for tickets, just as we did, years ago. It’s called 02 Academy now.) Anyway, we saw some good bands there such as Herman’s Hermits and The Kinks. I remember when they began singing ‘You Really Got Me’, the whole place was jumping, but they only sang one more song when lasses began to storm the stage. There were a few crash barriers poorly placed in between them and the crowd. The band ran off, so that was a washout. One of the lads who went there, I used to really fancy him, but the day he came into the shop where I worked, I ran behind the counter.

  ‘Linda, please will you serve him?’

  Well, I was only sixteen!

  Our shop was on the ground floor and upstairs was occupied by a bookies. I remember a man who worked there, huge, about nineteen stone, used to stand in the joint doorway covered in sweat and stinking of BO, getting some cool air. He wouldn’t move if the lasses tried to get past, so they were forced to squash by him – I always waited around until he went away.

  When I think back to age sixteen when such things caused embarrassment, how silly it all was: the opportunities missed, an inability to flirt or show interest in anyone. But this paled into insignificance to the problems and heartache suffered by two mothers in a neighbouring estate in Scotswood. A child of ten years of age, Mary Bell, was responsible for strangling to death two little boys who were three and four years old. She was subsequently charged with manslaughter in 1968. Her
mother was seventeen when Mary was born; she was a prostitute who was rarely at home and her father was a persistent criminal. The girl didn’t have a good upbringing, but those poor little lads, Martin and Brian, were robbed of growing up and their families were forever in torment.

  For two years I worked for a firm of solicitors as office junior and as such, bottom of the Last Will and Testament. John was an articled clerk who had failed his law exams to become a solicitor and didn’t us beneath him know it! When his shirts became tatty, he used to send me to Rahman, a tailoring and alteration company on Westgate Road, and I had to ask them to take the collar and cuffs off and sew them back on in reverse.

  Back then, wills and codicils were typed up on extremely thick paper, no mistakes could be made and Tippex was out of the question. There were dotted lines on the bottom of the documents and little red stickers; seals were placed next to where the signatures would be. Susan and Harriet were secretaries for the partners, Johnson and Carter. I would check the document through with them and take it to John. He gave me time to return back to the office, then rang through:

  ‘Can you come back here, please!’

  At this I would quake, knowing I had done something wrong. He once let me stand there, commanding I tell him what was wrong. I wanted to shout, ‘You stupid bugger! I’m terrified of you! Do you think I would make a mistake on purpose?’ But I stood there, allowing myself to be humiliated. I had missed the seal stickers off, which marked the place clients were to sign. I wouldn’t care, but he had a box of them in his drawer.

  He once caught me eating a crisp sandwich.

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing where I live!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Well, they’re big in Benwell,’ I smiled.

  There was another time when I went down further in his estimation. I was using an old Pitney Bowes franking machine which stamped the letters. He brought a letter through.

  ‘Where is Penzance?’ he growled.

  ‘In France?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s in Cornwall! You’ve stamped it air mail.’

  I did the same with a letter to Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

  For all his faults John was an extremely efficient and hard worker, but such an enormous snob. Mrs Cowen was well past retirement age – she worked for Johnson, did extra hours without pay, collected his dry cleaning and did his shopping. Her office was on the fourth floor and the lift was directly outside her office. The lift was in the centre of the building with stairs spiralling around it. She made sure that both sliding doors were left open on her floor so that she had permanent access to it. As office junior, I had to take a dish full of cups to the basement to wash up and as she had command of the lift, I walked upstairs to shut the doors and descend to my floor – where I placed the cups – and then down again.

  During the time I was employed there, she wore two skirts, which were covered in dog hairs (she kept five white Poodles). Every Christmas, she brought in the chocolates she didn’t like left over from various boxes she had received as presents. They were always covered in white glaze after being left out in the open. We couldn’t help but think that the Poodles had ferreted around, rejected them and we were bottom of the list. Everyone thanked her – and when she left the room, they went straight in the bin. She often made cakes which met a similar fate. I once took a plate of butterfly cakes in to one of the partners with his afternoon tea and he took a huge mouthful:

  ‘These are delicious!’ he said.

  ‘Mrs Cowen made them,’ I said as I watched him intently.

  He gagged and put the rest back on the plate.

  Mrs Cowen always made her own drinks in her room – Ovaltine, Horlicks, Choco-Milk. She brought her mug down to fill it with hot water. The dribbles resembled those wine bottles in restaurants where the candle drips in folds down the outside. I kept a large metal kettle and a teapot in our office and had been making tea for six months when I caught her swishing water around the inside of her cup and pouring it into our teapot. Once I told the others, it was kept in the safe after that!

  Part of my job was to search for old documents, wills and deeds, in the cellar. How I hated being in there! There were a few vaults for family possessions such as paintings and large black metal chests. Regular individual cases were put into brown envelopes in numerical order on rows of wooden shelving. There were only two shade-less bulbs, which gave the place a spooky glow. The toilets were also in the basement and I washed dishes in the Belfast sink. Health & Safety would have kicked up, but things like that went on. We used a gas ring on the floor of our office to heat soup on!

  Once a week I was sent to the registry office with deeds. I got to know a lad who worked for a solicitor’s office in Dean Street, who told me their building was haunted. I said our cellar was probably haunted too, it felt as if something was looking at me. We used to walk up Northumberland Street together and back after the deeds were stamped.

  Mr Johnson was always buzzing for Susan to go on a message, interrupting her work, but she was still expected to keep in time with his demands. Regularly, he would forget a deed or papers he needed for a case. On one occasion he was to collect his car before a drive to the station to catch a train to London to attend a very important hearing. He left the documents on his desk. Luckily, Susan went to check his office. We both rushed through town to find his car. Fortunately, she knew where he was likely to park too. He was just about to set off when she flagged him down, waving the documents. But she didn’t receive much in the way of thanks. When she informed him that she was thinking of taking a Saturday job to finance the purchase of a car, he wasn’t happy. His excuses involved what would people think, his secretary working in a shop? She was not offered a raise in salary although her tasks continued to be well outside of the job description.

  The private vaults were in a seriously filthy condition and Johnson sought an estimate from a cleaning firm. When they viewed the vaults, they advised that they were so bad, they would only take on the work if it was at least given a once-over first. Johnson lost no time in delegating this job to Susan and another secretary. They worked down there in terrible conditions for a whole week before the firm would accept the job.

  After one particularly fraught day of interruptions, he gave dictation and Susan returned to the office to type up. There were two buzzers on the wall, number 1 for Harriet and 2 for Susan, they were connected to an antique clock with an ivory face and ornate pointers. The buzzer hardly ever sounded from Carter, but Johnson had a poor memory and was always calling Susan back mid-sentence to add something else. After a bin full of letters, and another half hour of constant interruptions, she clambered onto the table and stuffed a wodge of tissue behind her number. A foppish Johnson peered round the door in his pinstripe suit.

  ‘Suuuuusan, didn’t you hear me buzz?’

  She carried on typing.

  ‘No.’

  He stood on a chair, stepped onto the table, pulled the tissue out and then chucked it in the bin.

  ‘Please come through and take a letter!’

  She took the letter using her shorthand skills and once more returned to her typing. In less than a minute the buzzer sounded again. This kept up and eventually she leapt onto the table, grabbed the pointers of the clock and wrenched them around and around until they snapped. Johnson appeared just as she was climbing down, noticed her flipped-out face, didn’t say a word and retreated back into his office.

  * * *

  Susan was great fun. We went out in our breaks to Jeavons music shop on Pudding Chare, where she would ask for a record to be played in one of the half-booths. One day, she chose Elvis Presley, who she loved: ‘All Shook Up’. She danced to the music, twisting and gyrating down to her ankles, but we never bought anything. The first record I had ever bought was ‘House of the Rising Sun’, recorded by The Animals in 1964. It was the most amazing song I had ever heard. At first, we thought that, being from Newcastle, they were referring to the Rising Sun Colliery in Wallsend, until we listen
ed more carefully and realised it was actually about New Orleans.

  Pudding Chare was popular with drinkers. It joined onto the Bigg Market, that dates back to the 1300s and was probably named after offal and black pudding. Such odd names, but Susan knew of the history and told me that ‘Chare’ is a North-eastern word for a winding narrow lane, which it was, and ‘Bigg’ is a form of Barley, not as I imagined to describe the size of the place. There was a pub called the Printer’s Pie on the lane and that wasn’t named after a dish with meat, it’s related to old printing practices. The Chronicle offices were nearby and journalists and printworkers drank there.

  There were three cleaners at the solicitor’s office. One of them, Mrs Black, was the supervisor. She had come into some money and suddenly began talking posh. She came to work dressed in the most luminous coloured clothing, bright oranges and pinks, and wearing huge sets of beads. She was also selling perfume products, which Susan and Harriet bought but they found they couldn’t wear it, threw it out and went to Fenwick on Northumberland Street instead to buy more expensive brands. One day, Susan was chatting to her and Mrs Black mentioned a shopkeeper, a Mr Smith. Susan knew him and often popped in to buy the odd bag of sweets. Later in the week, she called in.