MEMORIES PART 1. Some time ago I went through a box of old home movies. 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm films taken over a period of some sixty years. I viewed the reels as I picked then up so that the various stages of my life were in absolutely random order. I jumped about from the 1940s to the 1980s, back again and to various times in between. That’s what I expect these ramblings will be like. I shall skip backwards and forwards as some memory prompts the recall of something much earlier or even later. There will be huge gaps, a bit like the home movies, when I changed reels and skipped from one decade to another. Writing these meories down is one thing but putting them out for anyone to read is another, It may just be conceit but I was encouraged to add another post after seeing the number of memories I had jogged and the links to the past my post had awakened. Memories are strange things. Are the things we recall genuine memories of the actual event or are they memories of things you have been told in the past? Even worse, maybe you recall a memory and the thought processes fill in some of the faded colours and even bits of the picture that are missing. Next time it is brought to mind it comes complete with the additions and we may even add more bits to it, not in an attempt to deceive but just to make the picture clearer and sharper. A bit like using a computer to enhance an old family snapshot A cow in the lobby As an example. When I was about three years old, we lived in Clitheroe in what is described as a garden terraced house. In reality the garden is pocket handkerchief sized and separates the front door from the pavement by five or six feet. It may consist of a few square feet of paving stones or a few straggly plants which struggle to survive in a handful of soil. Granny was in the living room preparing lunch (We called it dinner in those days) for Mum and Dad who both worked in the cotton mill. I was playing in the ‘Garden’ with both the front door and iron gate leading to the front street wide open. At one end of St Mary’s Street was the Church, at the other was the local cattle market from where one of the cows wandered out to freedom and trotted sedately down our front street. Startled and frightened by the sight of a wandering cow, I ran down the lobby to the security of Granny and the living room. What happened? The cow followed me down the lobby! I cowered behind an upholstered chair in the corner; Granny looked up from the table where she was slicing bread. The cow by now was standing in the lobby looking into the living room. Granny with great presence of mind slammed the frosted glass door in the cows face and shouted “Go ‘ome, we ‘ave a dog!”. Just how the cow managed to back out of the lobby I will never know. I can remember the tiny garden, the frosted glass door between lobby and living room, Granny standing with bread knife in hand in a high collared dress, the upholstered chair - in fact every detail of the incident - but can I? Over the years I have told the story many times and I just wonder how many slight embellishments have been added or details reinforced - perhaps by seeing old family photographs of Granny. Or maybe having details filled in by versions told by other family members. I find it quite impossible to separate the genuine first hand memories from the other, quite innocent, additions. I suspect all of us have literally hundreds of such memories which can for no apparent reason pop into our minds. As you get older it becomes important to try to look forward to what is to come in life rather than looking back at what has already been. However, like most things, it is nice to be self indulgent once in a while and just wallow in memories and reminiscence. I will attempt to put these thoughts down in some sort of chronological order but I expect I shall do just do what the mind does if you allow it to wander - and I shall skip from one random memory to another. Granny Granny was my Father’s mother and I guess she lived with Mum and Dad from the day they were married. She was a tall, upright figure but I was too young to know her very well and she died when I was about eight. I was taken into the ‘Front Room’ to look at Granny as she laid in the polished wooden coffin and was encouraged to lay my hand on the forehead of this cold, still effigy of what had been my living Granny. I don’t know for certain but imagine she was born in the mid nineteenth century. When, in 1919, the newly married Alice moved in she was expected to do washing and household chores with arms covered to the wrist. It was unseemly for a woman to be seen with bare arms. There was apparently much ‘Tutting’ when Mum and Dad went out together on a Saturday evening. The woman’s place was in the home and that’s where she should stay whilst the husband went out. This must have been a similar postwar relaxation of standards which happened after the second world war. Imagine the shock poor old, straight laced, Grannie must have had when, years later, a six or seven year old Arthur, struggling to wrest his tricycle from Granny who was trying to prevent him going out onto the street, shouted in red faced childish anger and frustration, “Let go of it you - you - three wheeled old bugger!”. I swear I can remember the gasp of horror from a woman neighbour who just happened to be walking past the open front door. A CLITHEROE KID I was born in Clitheroe, a few door up from Smithson’s bakery on St Mary’s Street and had I been able to hit or catch a cricket ball, could have played for either Lancashire or Yorkshire as my birth certificate states that I was born in the Counties of Lancaster and York. Only the vaguest snatches of memory remain from those early years. Again they are random, unimportant snatches and I wonder why they have stuck in the memory banks. Playing with Arnold Smithson in the bakery and seeing the cockroaches running round the floor; watching my Dad kill young pullets in his small hen pen by breaking their necks on the corner of the shed; standing, holding his hand whilst he talked to a man who interspersed his conversation - not with ‘Sort ofs” or “You knows” but with “That iss”. I’ve no idea what his name was but he must have been an amateur fisherman because I can remember him handing a couple of fish (Trout?) to my Dad. I guess I must have been four when we left Clitheroe and moved to Barrowford. Dad had been a tackler in Clitheroe but as a result of the depression in 1929 and 1930 he was out of work. Having three children and without any real social benefits, times must have been desperately hard. My Mother, who had a highly developed sense of the dramatic, used to tell harrowing tales of these times. She told of being desperate for food and having no money at all. She dressed up in her finest, went to a local butcher, bought meat and then claimed (Using all her dramatic skills) that she had left her purse at home. Until the day she died she was still filled with a sense of guilt that she never, ever went near that shop again. Quite recently my sister, Dorothy, sketched, on the back of a cornflake packet, a picture of her and brother Vernon with a small hand cart. The wheels were iron gears that dad had brought home from the mill and the cart was an old wooden box. It was their Saturday morning task to go to the coal yard and collect a bag of coke for the family fires. Finally, in desperation, Dad took a job at Hapton gas works, stoking the boiler. This involved standing on top of the boiler and he had to leave as he could not afford to replace his shoes which were being burnt from his feet..
|