One Week in August

by Margaret Thornton

  But that was not the case. Alec returned to Blackpool in the autumn to see the famous Illuminations and, of course, to renew his friendship with Lilian. They had been writing to one another at least once a fortnight. Their relationship progressed as Alec continued to visit Blackpool each year, and Lilian was allowed, when the season ended, to visit Alec and his family in Burnley.

  Florrie was not surprised – in fact she was quite pleased – when they became engaged when Lilian was twenty-two. He was a grand lad, she told her neighbours, she couldn’t have wished for a nicer young man for her only daughter. She had not given much thought to where the young couple would live after their marriage. At all events Lilian’s work was there, in the boarding house, and she could not be spared. Her daughter tentatively explained that Alec had a very good job in the mill with every chance of promotion. But Florrie was deaf to her daughter’s words and refused to even discuss the matter. Alec realized, eventually, that if he wanted to marry the girl he loved he would have to give up his responsible job and come to live in Blackpool.

  They were married in 1934 and, after a spell of casual labour, Alec was employed by the local electricity company as a maintenance engineer, his work with the machinery in the mill having given him the experience he needed.

  Their first child, Janice, was born in 1937, and their son, Ian, six years later in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War.

  TWO

  Although Janice had been brought up in a Blackpool boarding house she had had little to do with the work involved. She knew that her mother worked long hours and was often tired, but she always had time to spend with her and her brother, Ian.

  Janice knew, intuitively, that her grandmother, Florrie Cartwright, was the one in charge of the business, but as time went on her mother, Lilian, assumed more and more responsibility.

  Janice had been distressed when her grandma had died two years ago, in 1953. It had been a great shock to them all as she had very rarely been ill, but the years of hard work had taken their toll and she did not recover from a massive heart attack.

  Her granddaughter remembered her as a short, stout woman with iron grey hair which she wore in a roll, often covered with a hairnet, and shrewd all-seeing eyes behind her steel-rimmed glasses. She was invariably clad in a voluminous cross-over floral apron, edged with red bias binding. There were jokes made about seaside landladies, reputed to be veritable battle axes – their caricature was pictured on hundreds of comic postcards – and Florrie fitted the image very well. But she was nowhere as forbidding as she looked. The same visitors returned year after year to the boarding house, which had a good reputation. She had treated Janice and Ian with love and kindness, although Janice had sometimes heard her mother grumbling to their father about Grandma’s stubbornness and unwillingness to move with the times.

  It was in the early fifties that Mrs Sanderson, who owned the boarding house next door, started referring to it as a private hotel. She had even given it a name, ‘Sandylands’, to the contempt and amusement of Florrie Cartwright.

  ‘Did you ever hear the like?’ she said to anyone who would listen. ‘Who does she think she is? ‘Sandylands’ indeed! It’s nowt but a boarding house, same as this. I reckon nowt to these jumped-up ideas.’

  ‘I think it sounds rather good, Mother,’ Lilian had dared to answer. ‘It’s a nice play on their name, the same as a lot of people are doing nowadays.’ There was a ‘Kenwyn’ across the road and a ‘Dorabella’ a few doors away.

  ‘Well, we don’t want any such nonsense here!’ she had declared.

  Last year, however, Lilian had given their house a name as well and had begun to refer to it in the adverts as a private hotel. Janice wondered whether her mother had done this to ‘thumb her nose’, so to speak, at Grandma. In fact their father, Alec, had said more or less the same thing.

  ‘Your mother would turn in her grave!’ he said.

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Lilian. ‘Why should she? I’ve tried to think of a name that is a tribute to Mother and all the hard work she did.’

  The name she had decided on was ‘Florabunda’. ‘It’s using her name – well, a part of it – and Florabunda is the name of a rose, a rambling rose with lots of blooms; and Mother loved roses, didn’t she? She liked to go and see the rose garden in Stanley Park, if she ever had the time. I thought of ‘Floravilla’ at first, but I think the other is better.’

  And as it was now Lilian’s business they all agreed that it sounded nice and was quite original. Janice could not help but feel, though, that her mother had her tongue in her cheek and was having a quiet laugh to herself.

  Lilian had also decided, now that her mother was no longer there to protest, that it was high time to change their tariff to bed, breakfast and evening meal, instead of full board. Many of the smaller hotels were doing the same, giving the visitors the whole day to themselves, instead of returning at midday for a meal. Three full meals a day was quite an undertaking.

  Janice scarcely remembered her early years in the boarding house. When she was two years old the Second World War had started. She could not remember that, of course, but she remembered it ending, in 1945. They had been given a day off school, and Pablo’s, the famous ice-cream parlour in the town, had been giving out free ice cream.

  She recalled little of her father, too, from those early war years. Alec was in his early thirties, far older than the majority of the army and airforce recruits, but he had joined the army, anxious to do his bit to beat Hitler. He had been stationed in Britain, though, the whole time, with the Royal Engineers, which was a great relief to his wife. Janice remembered him coming home on leave, probably from about 1941, and in 1943 Ian had been born. Only in 1945 were they able to settle down as a proper family unit.

  Janice had enjoyed hearing stories of the war years from her mother. In the September of 1939, immediately after war had been declared, they had been obliged to fill the house with evacuees. Their quota had consisted of mothers – including expectant mothers – with children under school age. They were from Liverpool, where it had been anticipated that bombing would soon take place. But this did not happen and by the end of the year the evacuees had all gone back home, having had a nice holiday at the seaside, and leaving in their wake, in many cases, soiled bedclothes, torn and scribbled-on wallpaper and cigarette burns on the furniture.

  Following hard on the heels of the evacuees, RAF recruits doing their initial training had filled Florrie’s boarding house to the brim, one batch following another throughout the war years. Janice had no recollection of the evacuees, but she did remember the RAF lads. Cheerful, noisy young men, forever laughing and joking as though they hadn’t a care in the world. She knew now, of course, that many of them would not have lived to see the end of the war. Several of them, though, who had come through it unscathed, now visited their former billet as holidaymakers, with their wives and young families.

  At the end of the war Florrie had agreed that certain changes had to be made to bring the boarding house more up to date, to suit the requirements of visitors returning for a holiday after almost six years of war.

  A toilet was installed on each landing and washbasins in each bedroom. There were still no bathrooms for the visitors, just as there had been none for the RAF recruits. They had used the facilities at the nearby Derby Baths, and the visitors had to be content with the luxury of running water in the bedrooms, which was a vast improvement on the bowl and jug system, not only for them but for the landladies and their helpers as well.

  Florrie had also agreed, after much persuasion, to have a bathroom put in for the use of the family. No rooms upstairs could be spared, so it was installed in an annexe, an extension to the kitchen at the rear of the house.

  Janice recalled what a novelty it had been to soak in a porcelain bath with water running from the hot and cold taps. They had formerly used a huge zinc bath which hung in the wash house when not in use. It had to be placed on the hearth in the living room and filled with
buckets of hot water heated by the coal fire. She had not been able to linger too long as the bath water had to be left for Ian when she had finished.

  She had never thought about what her parents and her grandmother had done about their weekly baths before the installation of the bathroom. It was considered, especially by Grandma, that one bath a week was sufficient. But Janice had now managed to persuade her mother that a bath each day, or at least every other day, was necessary for personal hygiene and cleanliness.

  Blackpool had soon got into its stride again at the end of the war, as the leading holiday resort in the north of England. Visitors returned in their hundreds and thousands. Some, indeed, had continued to holiday there even in wartime, despite the warnings on the propaganda posters, ‘Is your journey really necessary?’

  Blackpool had been one of the resorts where there was no threat of invasion. On the south and east coasts, nearer to the mainland of Europe, the beaches had been covered with stretches of barbed wire and made inaccessible to the public. There were no such restrictions in Blackpool, and wartime visitors cheerfully accepted the shortages of food and fuel. The town had lost little of its gaiety, the dance halls and the many cinemas remaining open throughout the conflict.

  The famous Illuminations were switched on again in 1949, on a much larger scale than before. The landladies and hotel proprietors rejoiced at the lengthening of their holiday season. They were now able to open from Easter until the beginning of November. Some of the larger hotels were open all year round, and many of the others opened up again for a Christmas break.

  Nineteen fifty-five was proving to be a memorable year for Blackpool. What would long be remembered as the highlight of the year had taken place on the 23rd of April, when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had visited the town to attend a Royal Variety Performance at the Opera House. It was the first time that such an event had taken place outside of London, and it was regarded as a feather in the cap for the northern seaside resort, so often the subject of jokes by those who lived in the south.

  Janice had stood with her friends in the centre of the town amongst a vast crowd of excited people, cheering and waving flags as the black limousine drove slowly along the road. There where gasps of delight and whispers of ‘Isn’t she lovely!’ as they set eyes on the young queen. She was, indeed, beautiful; as lovely as any film star in her ermine stole and dazzling coronet, with her handsome husband at her side.

  And what a lavish entertainment was in store for them once they arrived at the Opera House. It had been widely advertised in the local paper, telling which stars had been chosen to perform for Her Majesty. Among them were many who were already well known in Blackpool from their appearances year after year in the season shows. Morecambe and Wise, Arthur Askey, George Formby, Alma Cogan, the Tiller Girls, and children from the Tower Ballet, a show that was put on each year in the Tower Ballroom by children from the local dancing schools.

  Then the crowds of folk had turned away to go back home, Janice and her friends to a coffee bar in the town. The special performance was not for the hoi polloi, but for an audience of VIPs and for the lucky few who had been able to procure a ticket. The event had been talked about for long afterwards, throughout the glorious summer. The sun had shone all through June and July, and now, in August, there was no sign of an end to the brilliant weather.

  Janice was looking forward to starting work as a waitress on the first Saturday in August. This was the Bank Holiday weekend, when most of the hotels and boarding houses in the town would be filled to capacity. She had persuaded her mother that she must be dressed just as the other waitresses were dressed, in a black skirt and white blouse, and a white waist apron with a frill of broderie anglais.

  She was giving far more thought to, and feeling far more excited about, this, her first foray into a job of any kind, than she was about going to university in September. It had been taken for granted by her parents and her schoolteachers that this was what she would do, and Janice had fallen in with their plans for her. She was a clever girl and had always done well in the school exams. Studying came easily to her, and she was able to retain facts in her head, a very necessary skill for the A levels she had taken a couple of months ago. But she was by no means a ‘swot’ – such serious-minded girls were often ridiculed by less able pupils – and she had always been a popular member of her peer group.

  Janice knew that her parents were very proud of her, and ambitious for her as well. She knew that her mother had been obliged to leave school at fourteen to work with Grandma in the boarding house, and that her father, too, had left behind a job with prospects to marry the girl he loved.

  This was the main reason that Janice had gone along with her parents’ wishes. She had been accepted at Leeds University, depending on her A level results, but they were more or less a foregone conclusion. She would be reading English Literature, which had always been her favourite subject, but she had given little thought what her eventual career might be. She had an idea that she might like to be a librarian, or to go into publishing … but that was a long time in the future. Only three years, in point of fact, but Janice’s thoughts were very much in the present.

  She started work, full of enthusiasm, on the first Saturday in August. Her first appearance as a waitress would be at the evening meal, serving the new visitors who had arrived that day. Those who were leaving – apart from a retired couple who were staying for a fortnight – would be departing after breakfast. Janice was not serving at that meal, but she was up bright and early ready to help her mother, and Nancy and Olive, with the other jobs that awaited their attention.

  It being ‘change over day’ all the beds had to be stripped and made up again with clean sheets and pillow cases. Fresh towels were required as well, and a new tablet of soap on each washbasin, which would be made sparkling clean again with a touch of Vim. The dusting and polishing, and the ‘hoovering’ of the rooms was done on a different day by two cleaning ladies. Another necessary boon was that all the bed linen and towels were collected each week by the laundry van and returned a few days later in pristine condition.

  When the bedrooms were finished Nancy and Olive went home for the rest of the morning and the afternoon, and would return to set the tables ready for the evening meal at six o’clock. It was an early meal each evening to enable the visitors, if they so wished, to attend the second house – there were two performances each evening – at one of the many theatres in the town, or to go to the cinema.

  Janice went into the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon. ‘What are they having tonight, Mum?’ she asked, ‘and can I help?’

  ‘We’re doing chicken tonight,’ Lilian replied. ‘A nice traditional roast meal to start the week, and it’ll be a roast again tomorrow, seeing that it’s Sunday – roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; a lot of our guests are from Yorkshire – and roast potatoes and two veg, like your grandma always used to insist on. I shall do some of my more fancy meals, as your gran might have called them, later in the week. And no … I don’t want you to help with the cooking, love. You’ve done your stint for the moment. You can help Nancy and Olive to set the tables when they come back. We’re alright here, aren’t we, Freda?’

  ‘Yes, perfectly alright, Mrs Butler,’ answered Freda, the woman who came in each day to help with the preparation of the evening meal. ‘You go and get your feet up, Janice love, while you can. You’ll be rushed off those little feet of yours when you’re waiting on all those folk.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ said Janice cheerfully. ‘OK, Mum, I’ll see you later, if you’re sure there’s nothing I can do …?’

  ‘No; I’ve already said so. Go on with you! Like Freda says, you’ll be glad of a rest once you start waitressing.’

  Janice went up to her bedroom and made herself comfortable on the bed. She picked up the book she was currently reading, A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy. It was one she had not read before although she had read most of his well-known books. He was one o
f her favourite authors. They had studied his works for the A level exam, and he was on the reading list for uni. She would be reading the whole range of English literature during the three years, from the pre-Victorian era up to the present day.

  She knew, when the time came, that she would enjoy the studying, although she was not too sure how she would feel about leaving and then living away from home. Some of her friends were looking forward to this, they couldn’t wait to cut loose the apron strings and have a taste of freedom. Or so they said. They complained about their parents and all the dos and don’ts they had to endure. Janice considered that she was lucky with her own mum and dad and her home life. They allowed her all the freedom she wanted, although she probably didn’t ask for very much. She had never wanted to disobey them or to stage a minor rebellion, as some of her friends said they had done.

  If she went into town, to one of the dance halls, which was very rarely, or to the cinema, she was expected to be home by eleven o’clock. The youth club she attended at the local church finished at ten, and she always came straight home. The activities there, though, had begun to pall recently; playing table tennis, listening to records, and lessons in ballroom dancing in which only the girls seemed to be interested. She had been going there since she was fourteen, and most of the teenagers now were much younger than she was. Yes, maybe she was ready for a more mature way of life. At the moment, though, she had a job of work to start, and she was determined to work just as hard as the other women and to be as proficient and helpful as they were.

  She spent much of the afternoon wool-gathering rather than reading, her mind all over the place. Her friends who were working in hotels on the prom didn’t appear to be enjoying it very much; they were just doing it for the money and they were treated as minions by the permanent staff. Janice had the advantage of familiarity with her surroundings and her workmates, but she would try to make sure that they looked on her as a co-worker and not someone who was just playing at the job.