Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  ‘My mother used to shop at the Co-op for tins and foodstuff for the store cupboard but went to the high street butcher’s and baker’s for fresh meat and bread. She then sent me when I was old enough. She also shopped at Fine Fare and Bi-Rite – both no longer in existence.

  ‘As a young child we had many weekend outings, places relatively close by, and, yes, Silloth was one of them along with a run further up the road to Allonby. At Silloth we would walk along the sea front and run up and down the steps to the mainly stony seashore, providing the tide was out, of course. Me and my brother and sisters would collect seashells and sometimes the odd crab or two. We would also dig for anything that might be lurking just below the surface and collect all sorts of snails and other pond life. If we could find a bit of sand we would have competitions to see who could build the best sandcastles, then take great delight in knocking them down. Of course, we all then had to have a paddle in the usually freezing sea, then we would end up running back up to the steps, shivering, to get dried off. Sometimes we would go into the amusement arcade and play on the penny slot machine and bandits with any loose change Mam had put by. If we were lucky we would be treated to a candyfloss.

  ‘We usually took a picnic tea. There would be a bottle of fizzy pop for us kids and the traditional Thermos of tea for the parents. To eat the picnic, quite often we would drive a few miles down the coast along to the sand dunes at Allonby. We’d have an old-fashioned tartan blanket along with a couple of deckchairs. The chairs being for Mam and Dad, we had to sit on the blanket. It would all be spread out on the grass and the picnic would begin. There was usually some sort of scrap between us kids as to who had had the most cakes or biscuits, or who would have the last sandwich. This was quickly sorted out by Dad who would say, “If you lot don’t shut up and behave yourselves none of you will get any more.” None of us dared argue with Dad, so that was quickly the end of the squabble.

  ‘Another place we used to go for outings was Hammond’s Pond, a park which was just a couple of miles away and still within the city. There were rowing boats and we would have come prepared with some stale bread to feed the ducks, running away if they got too close to us. There was a good play park with the usual swings and roundabouts and a huge helter skelter – well, it was huge to us. If my memory serves me correctly, there was an aviary with lots of different birds to look at.

  ‘There were still fields immediately behind our back garden and we would play there and look for brambles so that Mam could bake a cake. Beyond was a railway line that ran across the back of the field. We would sit many a long while collecting train names and numbers from engines like the Flying Scotsman.

  ‘All of these places we used to go as children were basically free – apart from making up the picnic – but they provided good fun and lots of exercise and the fresh air that we were always being told we all needed. Really, I think Mam and Dad just wanted to tire us all out. More often than not most of us fell asleep in the car on the way home.

  ‘We also used to all go to my grandmother’s for tea on a Sunday. This was always a feast as she was a great cook and baker of every kind of cake imaginable. Apart from all the goodies, she used to give us each a sixpence. That was a small fortune. You could go the sweet shop twice and still have a halfpenny left. We used to be able to get four fruit salad or black jack chewy sweets for one penny.

  ‘As a child growing up in the fifties and sixties, I think we had a happy fun time. None of it cost our parents very much, which is just as well as generally there was not a lot of spare money. We made our own fun and enjoyed it mostly for free.

  ‘Nowadays, children aren’t able to just play outside. Everything outside the house is sort of prearranged and seems to cost so much. We would play tennis or badminton in the street with a makeshift net made from an old bit of washing line, holding it up or tying it to a couple of lamp posts. It was fun and free and encouraged us to use our initiative. Today, the kids have to go to a sports club and everything is there for them.’

  Barbara’s father did have a car, which was still unusual in the late 1950s and 1960s. During the war, and just afterwards, when Ivy, Dulcie, Dorothy and Jean were growing up, no one in working-class families had a car. The streets were always empty, the better for young boys to play marbles along the gutters or football down the length of the street or for girls to play hopscotch or skipping. No need for parking signs or parking meters, or speed limits and restrictions. No one had a vehicle to park or to speed in. In an ordinary working-class street, whether council houses or terrace rows, if you saw a car parked in the street the chances were it was the doctor come to visit someone poorly. A doctor visiting you at home, that is also now a period piece, as much as totally empty, vehicle-free streets.

  By the late fifties, things were picking up a bit economically, with full employment. Barbara’s father was a lorry driver, so he was reasonably well paid if he did overtime, and having his own little car was useful to get himself to the lorry depot.

  ‘I can’t remember exactly when Dad got his first car. I was quite young at the time, probably around six or seven years of age, so it must have been around 1960. I believe it was an Austin A40, quite a small car, and fairly old, bought second hand. It was black, but then quite a lot of cars of the time were black. He did at one time have a car with a starting handle, but I really can’t remember what model it was. That one may have been the Austin, possibly an Austin Cambridge. My memory may be lying to me on his early ones.

  ‘But I do remember him having a car called, I believe, a Vauxhall Ventora. It was a lot bigger than the little Austin. It was white and had classy red leather seats. I think the front seat was called a bench seat, which was one seat rather than two individual seats. I also think it had a column gear change rather than the more traditional gearstick. In those days cars were not fitted with seat belts.

  ‘By the early seventies, probably due to my mother’s money management skills, my parents were able to buy a brand-new car. They bought a Ford Zephyr from the local dealership. It was a larger car, which was needed to accommodate all us kids. By this time I would be about eighteen. I seem to remember the car costing the princely sum of £672.

  ‘There were by now a few other neighbours that had cars. It was almost always the husband’s car, as they would need it to get to and from work. Not so many women had a car in those days – or could drive. The mums and the kids would either walk into town, and you would see loads of them on a Saturday morning, humping all their shopping back, or they would get the bus into town, depending on the finances at the end each week.’

  The big change in Barbara’s life came at the age of eleven when it was time to leave her primary school, Pennine Way in Harraby, one of Carlisle’s biggest housing estates.

  ‘I knew the Eleven Plus was coming up and looked forward to it. I was confident I would pass, everyone said I would. Let’s put it this way, I would have been very disappointed if I hadn’t passed. In fact I found it easy.’

  There were only two girls in her class who passed for the high school that year, a fairly typical result for a primary school in the heart of a council estate, compared with a primary school like Stanwix, in the north of the city, which was surrounded by private semis and detached houses and where at least half the class each year went on to the high school or the grammar school.

  ‘It was strange to meet girls whose fathers were doctors or dentists, but it didn’t bother me, I didn’t feel intimidated. If people don’t accept me for what I am, then I am not going to bother with them. I had an old head on young shoulders.’

  Getting the uniform was a bit of a headache and proved expensive. It was only available at certain shops, like Harker & Bell, which was expensive, but good quality, where the middle-class girls got their uniform, or the Co-op which was a bit cheaper. You were limited to these two or three shops and they kept the prices high.

  ‘But there were no really cheap places, as there are today, like Asda or Tesco. I noticed last we
ek you can buy three polo shirts suitable for school for £3.50, or even less.

  ‘Back in the late fifties and sixties, school clothes were so expensive. I don’t know how my mother managed, what with buying the blazer and the badge, which had to be sewn on, plus all the tunics and skirts and gym clothes and thick grey tights, not forgetting the dreaded maroon felt beret. With your grey dress you had to wear grey knickers and maroon knickers with your maroon gym tunic. We had to embroider our names on the back of our gym knickers during the first sewing lesson we had.

  ‘Your dress had to be no more than half an inch off the ground when you knelt down, that was the rule. Modesty, I suppose. You couldn’t eat in the streets, not if you were in school uniform, not even a penny ice lolly. We did buy them of course, hiding in a lane on the way to school to suck them.

  ‘If you were caught, the punishment was a loss of house points. The house system was very strong and there was great competition. They were named in Greek – Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.

  ‘Maths, I could still do easily. If I forgot or could not be bothered to do my homework, I could do it in ten minutes on the way to school. But I hated Latin. I couldn’t see the point of it. I knew I was never going to use it, all that stuff about puella habit tunicam – the girl has a tunic. I think that’s right, but maybe not. Amazing I have remembered any of it, after all these years.

  ‘I didn’t want to learn it and it has been no use to me in life – though recently I have been looking at the various medicine tablets I have been taking and knowing a bit of Latin has helped me, like di means two or double. But at the time, I thought what rubbish, I’m never going to be a doctor, so there’s no reason to learn Latin.’

  While not liking Latin and some of the other subjects, Barbara did not cause trouble or speak out. She went behind the bike sheds to have a smoke, but so did other girls. ‘I did not fear authority, but I liked to comply whenever I could. I never shouted my mouth off, or challenged authority, unless I was very sure of my facts.

  ‘Many of the teachers were old maids and a bit scary, like Miss Haig who had her hair in a plait, a big wart on her face and a moustache. We would poke fun at how she looked behind her back, which was bad. As an adult, I would never do that. Then there was Mrs Murray-Seaforth who was Scottish and very eccentric. You had no idea what she would do or how she would react. She would go down a line and shout VG, VG, VG, VG at every girl, while another time she would go down the line and every one would lose house points.’

  After three years, and in what was then called the fourth year, about to make her decisions on what O levels to take, Barbara decided to leave high school. This was most unusual. Girls in the sixties did not do such things, unless they had been expelled or fallen pregnant. Getting to the high school was seen as a passport to higher education, a better life, all the supposed good things. So why give it up?

  ‘I got it into my head that what I wanted to be was a secretary and the high school did not do typing and shorthand. It was all very academic.’

  The other element was the political changes taking place. All over the country, comprehensive schools were about to come in. In 1967 in Haringey, an Outer London Borough, they closed thirty-seven grammar schools and secondary moderns overnight and turned them into eleven comprehensives.

  In Carlisle in 1968, the long-established, 800-year-old Carlisle Grammar School was joined with two secondary technical schools, the Creighton and Margaret Sewell, to become Trinity, a huge comprehensive.

  In 1967, when Barbara made her decision to leave, Carlisle’s High School for Girls was still a selective grammar school, though in a year or so, it was to turn into St Aidan’s Comprehensive. The changes had not been finalised, but some schools that had earlier been seen as less favoured had already started to gear up. One of them was Morton School, a secondary modern very near where Barbara lived. It was about to turn itself into a comprehensive, at least in name. It had opened a new wing, which offered secretarial and office training. This is partly what attracted Barbara, and made her want to leave the high school.

  So in September 1967, along with one other high school girl, she enrolled at Morton School.

  ‘My mother was not 100 per cent pleased. But she said OK then, I could go on condition I stayed on till I was sixteen at the new school and take O levels, which I did. I think I got eleven in all – five Os and seven CSEs at A/B grade. A grade was supposed to count as the equivalent of an O level.’

  At the new school, Barbara was seen as a bit of snob, who thought she was ‘it’ having come from a superior, selective school.

  ‘The girls were not so bad as I knew many of them locally, but some of the teachers were sarcastic. They would actually say in class, “You think you are better than the others because you have come from that place.” It took me a while to realise it was true – we were a year ahead in many of the lessons. We stood out, and therefore got picked on. If we were in a group caught smoking, along with loads of others, we would be the ones hauled out, just because we had gone to “that high school”.’

  Looking back, Barbara thinks today she is on the whole in favour of selection, of competition, and does not think the old Eleven Plus exam was so bad after all. She does not think it made pupils feel like failures if they did not pass, in fact she believes it probably alienated the few people from her sort of council estate who did pass for the high school or grammar school as it separated them from their peer group.

  ‘People have to be treated equally, and made to feel they are of equal importance, even if they are all going to achieve different things in life.

  ‘On the other hand, in life, you have to take your knocks, so starting early in life having some knocks is not all that bad.’

  Barbara’s first job in life was at thirteen, when she became a newspaper delivery girl, morning and evening.

  ‘After a few months I was “promoted”, you could say, deployed in the shop marking up the addresses on the newspapers. This was far preferable to going out in all weathers delivering. At the age of fifteen, was also employed as a Saturday girl in Woolworths. The wage was £1 3d for the day. I cannot remember exactly how much I was paid from the newsagent but think it started at about seven shillings – this would be in 1966/1967. This extra pocket money earned by myself saved my parents from having to give me set pocket money each week. I am sure it also taught me at an early age the value of working for things that I wanted.’

  Aged sixteen in 1970, Barbara left school for full-time work, starting in the offices at Pirelli, the tyre factory, though at the time the Carlisle factory was mainly producing slippers. Her first wage was £25 a month.

  ‘I was in the wages department, calculating the gross wage from the hourly rate and the hours worked plus any overtime that may have been due, making up the wages, working out the tax and national insurance to be taken off, and finally handing the wage packets to the employees. I quickly realised that some of the girls on the factory floor, with no O levels, making slippers, were getting twice as much as me, if they were on piecework and doing well.’

  So she looked for another office job, this time in an engineering firm, where she felt a bit happier as her pay went up from roughly £6 a week to £8.50p.

  Note the 50p. Not ten shillings. In 1971 in the UK, the decimal age arrived and out went shillings and pence. Until then there had been 240 pennies in a pound – denoted by the letter d from the Latin denarius, which of course Barbara would have spotted. There were twenty shillings in a pound – s standing for a shilling, from the Latin solidus. And every shilling contained twelve pennies. Now we had a hundred new pennies, signified by a p, in a pound. Simple.

  It had only taken the UK 150 years to make the change. The first movement for decimalisation had started in 1824, influenced by the change in France in 1795 when the decimal franc was introduced, containing a hundred centimes.

  Barbara, being good at maths, was well able to cope and understand all the complications, which at first confused so ma
ny British people. Barbara has always been interested in money – how to get it, what to do with it, what it can do.

  ‘I always religiously gave a third of my wages each week to my mother. I kept a third to myself and a third I saved. I opened an account at the Cumberland Building Society. In those days, the seventies, the interest rates were about 7–8 per cent.’

  As a wage earner, Barbara started buying her own clothes and became interested in fashion and in popular music.

  ‘Mostly I liked to buy clothes at a shop called Van Allen which was next to the old Woolworths store on English Street. They were reasonably cheap and quite fashionable. When I was younger, I could get a dress for about 29s 11d or 39s 11d – which is about £1.50 to £2 in today’s money. There was also another shop call Paige’s that a lot of young women used.

  ‘Van Allen was next to True Form shoe shop which had reasonably fashionable and reasonably priced shoes. Like dresses, shoes were usually priced around 29s 11d or 39s 11d, or sometimes less in the sales. Then there was the likes of Saxone, which was generally a bit more expensive and sold branded shoes like Hush Puppies. They were probably around 49s 11d or 59s 11d.

  ‘I tended to like classic styles with a hint of current fashion, maybe in the detail or the colour, as they tended to last a bit longer, although of course I occasionally deviated from this.

  ‘I did have platform shoes and of course hot pants, both against my parents’ advice. I also longed for a midi skirt and a “crop” top and did get both. The skirt was black and buttoned all the way down the front, but the top I had to knit myself. It was the palest peach colour.

  ‘We all wore nylons with of course a suspender belt. I was not made to wear a corset although I can remember my grandmother lacing up hers and my mother wearing one for a back complaint.

  ‘As a child I was made to wear a liberty bodice, as most young kids still were.