by Gordon Banks
I never saw this vase containing flowers (they would have had to have been very small). Fresh flowers were a rarity in our home as they were in every other house. In the summer Mam would occasionally give me a threepenny bit and send me down to the allotments to ask one of the owners, ‘Have you got any chrysanths you don’t want?’ Chrysanths – that was all the steelmen who worked the allotments seemed to grow in the way of flowers. With their football-like blooms and tall stems these flowers dominated the small living rooms of the houses they fleetingly graced. It was as if, having been denied fresh flowers for the best part of a year, these allotment owners thought, ‘What’s the point in growing small, delicate flowers that will have little impact in a room? If we’re going to have flowers, let’s grow them big enough for everyone to see and marvel at.’ I only heard their full name, chrysanthemums, when I was in my late teens. True, chrysanths runs off the tongue a lot easier but, looking back, there might have been another reason for our constant use of the shortened version of the name. To have called these flowers by their full and correct name would have invited accusations of trying to get above your station. ‘Chrysanthemum’ sounds Latin, something only posh kids learned. In Sheffield in the forties such class distinction was as clearly drawn by the working class as it was by the middle and upper classes.
Furniture and the wireless apart, what possessions people did have took the form of such trinkets. The red glass vase in the Archers’ front window was typical of the ornaments that used to decorate every conceivable surface in the home, including the walls, where lines of brightly coloured plaster ducks, of decreasing size, seemed to fly up the wall in a desperate bid for freedom. Being plaster ornaments, of course, they never moved. Just like many of the people whose homes they graced.
For a young Tinsley lad, the only escape from a lifetime of work in the steel foundry or pit, was sport, mainly football and boxing. Cricket then was still the domain of the gentleman player and professionals were few and far between. I had three childhood passions, the most important of which was football. In those days it was quite common to watch both the Sheffield teams, Wednesday and United, on alternate Saturdays. With money short, however, I rarely got the chance to see either. In fact, between the age of seven and fifteen, I reckon I saw no more than twenty games at Wednesday or United, though counted myself lucky to have seen that many.
Tinsley County School was only a stone’s throw from Tinsley railway shed, where steam trains were housed and serviced. At times there were up to fifty steam engines in there, each belching smoke and steam in competition with that from Peach and Towser’s. The phrase ‘Go outside and get some fresh air’ was never heard from the teachers in my school.
The close proximity of the railway shed was a bonus to me, for my second passion was trainspotting. It’s a hobby much ridiculed today, but in the forties, with no television, no computers and few toys, train spotting was a hobby taken up by most of the boys round our way. It cost next to nothing to get started. All you needed was Ian Allan’s ABC Spotters’ Book, a notebook and a pencil. I rarely ventured outside Tinsley and the sight of engines from other towns and cities always filled me with a sense of wonder. They may have come from distant Newcastle or London, or just Wakefield or Bradford. It didn’t matter. Just seeing them evoked in me a feeling of travel, a consciousness of places I’d only heard of, or whose names I had only seen on a map. It was as if these faraway places had come to visit me. Though I never moved from my vantage point on that sooty brick wall a short walk from my home, I felt my horizons broaden.
At Tinsley shed my devotion to trains and football combined, for there was a class of locomotive named after famous football teams. I remember it always gave me a great thrill to see these particular engines. Names such as Bradford City, Sunderland, Sheffield United and Everton emblazoned above the centre wheel of the engine, with the arced nameplate bearing not only the club’s colours but a half caseball made of shining copper. Many of these nameplates now adorn the reception areas of their respective clubs and to see them always brings back memories of my childhood at Tinsley County School.
For quite another reason, the close proximity of the railway shed was a boon to many Tinsley families, mine included. In the shed yard was a coaling stage, under which steam engines stopped to have their tenders replenished with coal. To one side of the coaling stage was a large stockpile of coal, a magnet to the many families on the breadline. Many was the time my mam would send me and one of my brothers down to Tinsley shed to procure coal for our fires in my old pram. We’d fetch the pram from our backyard shed under cover of darkness and push it to a well-known spot in the wooden fence that ran along one side of the shed yard. A number of fence panels had been loosened by countless others keen to put heat in their hearths, and it was simply a matter of my brother raising these panels to allow me and the pram through to the yard. Then my brother and I would walk up and down the sidings near the coaling stage on the look-out for windfall coal. (We never took it from the stockpile; Mam would have considered that to be stealing. Picking up stray lumps of coal that had fallen from a tender or spilled from the coaling stage during refuelling she considered to be no more than helping keep the engine shed yard tidy – a view not shared by the shed foreman.)
The pram was large and navy blue, with highly sprung, spoked wheels. We always had the hood down, because once the carriage of the pram had been filled with good-sized pieces of coal, we could always use the collapsed hood for any amount of smaller lumps. Fully laden, we’d then set off for home, nervously negotiating the rough ground back to the fence. A speedy exit from the shed yard was impossible as the heavy pram would constantly jerk and veer to either side whenever it came into contact with the many stones and bits of iron protruding from the ground. Quite often we had to leave with the pram only half full of coal as we were alerted by the beam of the foreman’s torch bearing down on us from a hundred yards away. Once through the loose fence my anxiety lifted and I’d chirp away merrily to my brother, as we pushed our ill-gotten bounty along the smoother pavements back to Ferrars Road, only braving the cobblestones when we had to cross a street.
We’d come in by the backyard door and call to Mam in great triumph like hunters bringing home the kill. Mam, dressed in her ‘pinny’, would come out to cast an eye over what we had brought home, some pieces the size of a kettle, the small lumps, for making the fire up in the morning, safely stowed in the pram hood. Mam suitably satisfied, my brother and I would then unload the pram into the coalhouse, careful not to break the big lumps. I’d then wash my face and hands in the kitchen sink before changing into my pyjamas and enjoying a supper of toast made on a fork in front of a blazing fire, courtesy of the night’s work.
We had no bathroom, the kitchen sink was where matters of personal hygiene were attended to in the form of a twice-daily wash. But Friday night was bath night. A tin bath was taken down from its hook in the shed, placed on newspaper in front of the living-room fire and laboriously filled by Dad with kettles of hot water. First to go was Dad, then Our Jack, then David, Michael and finally, the youngest – me. Being the fifth user of the same bathwater, it’s a wonder I didn’t get out dirtier than when I went in. The Friday-night bath ritual was not restricted to the Banks household. Everyone I knew had just one bath a week. It was also the only time I changed my vest and underpants. I wince at the thought now, but that’s how it was, for me, for every young lad I knew. There were no modern labour-saving appliances such as washing machines to switch on every day. Our clothes were washed every Monday, in the kitchen, with a poss tub and dolly, after which, Mam would hand-rinse everything and then put them all through a hand-operated wringer before hanging them out on the line to dry or, in the event of rain, on wooden clothes horses dotted around the living room. Come Tuesday they would be dry. On Wednesday they were ironed and then put away ready for us to wear again on Friday after our bath, and so the cycle was repeated. This was typical of the many domestic routines adhered to, week in, wee
k out in our house. Mam’s life must have been as monotonous as mutton, as regular as a roll on an army drum. That my childhood was always happy, secure and filled with a warm heart, though money was always tight, is all the more to her credit.
In the forties and fifties it was not done for parents and children to show each other outward signs of affection. I had a happy childhood, Mam and Dad were caring and, in their own way, loving, but never tactile or overtly affectionate. My family was not unusual in this. I never came across a family in which the parents hugged and kissed their children, or, devoted any considerable one-to-one time to their offspring. It just wasn’t the done thing. Life was hard for the vast majority of families I knew, a matter of daily survival. It was commonly believed that if children were showered with hugs and kisses at every opportunity they would grow up to be ‘soft’, incapable of coping with the daily grind of working life. By not hugging and kissing at every opportunity, parents believed they were doing their children a favour, instilling in them independence and the ability to cope with the rigours of adult life. Moreover, parents did not have free hours to spend playing with their children even at weekends, or to read to them before bedtime. Because the household chores were so labour intensive, the precious time Mam devoted to my three brothers and I, she did so while undertaking some aspect of housework. Mam would talk to us, acknowledge what we were doing and encourage us in our play while either washing, ironing, preparing a meal or attending to some other daily chore.
Dad, meanwhile, was no different to any other father in that he would come in from work and have his tea. Having satisfied himself that my brothers and I had been up to nothing untoward that day, he’d settle down to read the evening paper. Dad’s time immersed in the Sheffield Star was sacrosanct. The Victorian notion of the male as head of the family was still very much in evidence and in order for Dad to evaluate and make decisions that affected family well-being, he felt he had to know what was going on in the world. Or, at least our world, which extended as far as the Sheffield boundaries. Gossip apart, his only source of information was the local evening newspaper and woe betide my brothers and I if we ever interrupted his reading of it.
Mam read the Star too, though always after Dad and usually when I was getting ready for bed. Mam and Dad reacted in different ways to what they read in the paper. When Dad disapproved of some item of news he would tut and sigh and usually conclude with the statement ‘They want locking up,’ or, in the case of something appalling such as a serious assault or murder, he would elaborate with ‘They should lock them up and throw away the key.’ As a small boy I believed that this was a genuine punishment administered by the courts, in which the judge would pronounce the grave sentence that the defendant be locked up and the key thrown away – whereupon the constable would suggest that the canal would be the best place for it. I still think of this when I hear or read this popular phrase.
In contrast, Mam’s reading of the paper often appealed to her sentimental side. Such sentiment was invariably applied to the predicaments of people she had no knowledge of, and never would. Her interest in the lives of people entirely remote from her world was like the fascination today for the trials and tribulations of characters from TV soaps. The fact there were other people, rich and poor, enduring emotional upheaval in their lives on a day when she was not, was something of a comfort to her. ‘I see the brother of the Earl of Harrogate has died,’ Mam would say aloud on reading the piece, no doubt aware only then that there was indeed an Earl of Harrogate with a brother; ‘there’s always trouble for somebody in this world.’ Thus she was confirmed in her belief that life was a sea of troubles.
That I always felt secure in childhood was, I am sure, in no small way due to the small routines of home life. On a Saturday lunchtime, for example, we always had fishcake and chips. Fish may well have been cheap and plentiful, but fishcakes were cheaper still and much more in keeping with a tight budget. It was my job to fetch the fishcake and chips and I did this on a bicycle that had more than a touch of Heath Robinson about it. To buy even a second-hand bicycle was beyond our means but when I was about twelve I cobbled together a contraption from spare parts found discarded on a bomb-site. The front wheel was missing many of its spokes, the brake blocks were worn down to the metal and the hard bakelite seat had a habit of swivelling around whenever I adjusted my position which made for not only an uncomfortable, but often perilous ride. It was on this conveyance that I collected our fishcake and chips on a Saturday.
There were two fish and chip shops in our neighbourhood, but Dad always insisted I went to the one five streets from where we lived because the chips were fried in dripping. I’d ask for six fishcake ‘lots’ (i.e. ‘with chips’), put them into my mother’s string bag and pedal off home. Riding that old bike was a precarious business at the best of times; with a fully laden string bag swinging from the handlebars it was downright dangerous. Once the bag became entangled in what few spokes were in the front wheel. The bike immediately ground to a halt, stood vertically on its front wheel and I was pitched headfirst on to the cobblestones of the street, my hands outstretched in an attempt at breaking my fall. I had skinned the palms of my hands but, far worse, dinner was scattered all over the street. Terrified to go home and ask for more money I simply scooped up the fishcakes and chips off the ground and rewrapped them in the newspaper as best as I could before limping home. I spent that dinner suppressing nervous laughter as I watched Dad bemusedly picking little bits of grit off his chips. My brothers, less particular in their eating habits, simply wolfed their fishcake and chips with all the enthusiasm and relish of lads who seemingly hadn’t seen food for a week.
That old bicycle again served me well on Saturday mornings when Mam would give me a shopping list and ask me to cycle to Tinsley Co-op to fetch the groceries. The shop was only in the next street but such was the grocery order, it was better to take the bike than walk as the numerous paper carrier bags full of bulky groceries could be hung from the handlebars and seat. The weekly order rarely varied: a pound of sugar; a pound of butter, not pre-packed but wire-cut from a large block then wrapped in greaseproof paper; plain and self-raising flour; bacon and sausage; three loaves of bread, two white, one brown; a dozen eggs; a drum of salt, either ‘Cerebos’ or ‘Saxa’, Co-op marmalade and jam; ginger snaps, rich tea or ‘Nice’ biscuits; Shippams meat paste for the making of sandwiches; Oxo cubes, Bisto, Echo margarine for baking; tinned fruit; Carnation milk; Heinz (sometimes Armour) baked beans; Ye Olde Oak luncheon meat and the only sort of salmon I knew existed – tinned (the Co-op’s own-brand variety, as John West salmon was out of our budget). There was a lot more, but that was the core of the order every Saturday morning, week in, week out, year after year. The lack of variety was testament to the limited choice available in a country still struggling in the aftermath of rationing. The fact that I was never bored by the food placed before me just goes to show how clever Mam was at using the limited ingredients at her disposal.
It is now a constant source of amazement to me that, with all her chores at home, Mam also had a part-time job as a cleaner-cum-cook up at the Big House, the home of the ‘well to do’ family of one of Sheffield’s lesser steel magnates. I never saw inside the Big House nor glimpsed the family who owned it. The large Victorian house – rumoured to have seven bedrooms and (amazingly) a bathroom – was hidden from sight by a high, soot-blackened wall; the children went to different schools from ours; the parents never patronized the shops in Tinsley.
Mam’s job took her into this different world, where she did ‘a bit of cleaning and a bit of cooking’. She never talked about her work there or the people she worked for. I suppose she felt it her duty not to gossip, not to ‘carry tales’ as she called it. The family must have treated her well – she certainly wouldn’t have stayed in that house if she hadn’t been treated with respect. The only regular time Mam spent away from the daily chores of our house was when she went to do similar work in the Big House. Looking back, Mam’s qu
ality of life must have been pretty awful. Dad rarely took her out, even for an hour to the local pub. Our house was where Mam spent most of her adult life. That she made that draughty house a loving home full of warm smiles, is my abiding memory of her.
On Sunday lunchtimes Dad would invariably go off to the pub to meet his mates, leaving me to help Mam cook the Sunday dinner. The preparation of the Sunday roast was always done to the accompaniment of the wireless. I would shell the peas or, if we were having lamb, chop the mint. In those days we would have either lamb or beef – and that piece of meat would be made to last until Tuesday. Chicken then was still an expensive luxury, and we only ate turkey at Christmas.
At noon Mam would switch on the wireless for Two Way Family Favourites. On the rare occasion when I heard its title music, ‘With a Song in my Heart’, nowadays, I can immediately smell a Sunday dinner. The idea of the show was that everyone had a special song in their heart for someone they loved, whether they were in the forces overseas or had relatives who had emigrated. The programme was two way in that it linked a family at home with a loved one abroad. Two presenters in London were linked with colleagues in Cologne and Cyprus (places where our armed forces had a considerable presence) and later, when the programme expanded its remit to include the growing number of people who had emigrated from the UK, Toronto and Sydney.