Читать книгу Moving - Andy Hargreaves - Страница 17

When Doris wasn’t at school, in the back of her family’s two-up, two-down terraced house, she would care for her younger brothers, Raymond and Stanley, and wash the tins and trays her mother would need for the tiny bakery she ran out of their front room. The Depression forced the family to close the bakery. These were hard times for many. Doris even recalled having to take a pram to the local pit to scavenge slack, or bits of coal, for the downstairs fire.³⁰

Doris left school when she was fourteen and, for a few shillings a week, went to work in weaving, munitions, and carpet-sweeper factories. In one of her jobs, she had to twist wire coils by hand, which caused her palms to bleed. She protested and was subsequently given her cards. She arrived at the employment exchange to find that her former supervisor had called ahead, recommending they not give her work because she’d been fired for insubordination. Later in life, Doris often recalled having “prayed each day for that factory to burn down.” Uncannily, a few months after she’d been let go, it did!³¹

Doris was not averse to a good time. In her old age, she sometimes spoke wistfully about a dashing airman she would go to dances with at the seaside in Blackpool, where her mum’s relatives still lived. As a teenager, she carried a torch for her cousin Lesley, who died when he crashed his motorcycle. Doris kept Lesley’s memory alive by choosing his name as the middle name for her firstborn son, Peter. In an uncompromising working-class culture, my brother did not thank her for burdening him with what was widely regarded as a girl’s name at the time.

From time to time, Doris would also enjoy a good night out with her glamorous cousin and lifelong best friend, Vida, until her dad put a stop to this when she came home late one night—by ripping her dress from her shoulders and throwing it on the fire.

Doris was a strong and independent woman. As a teenager, she could dive off the top board in the public swimming baths. She could still do cartwheels into her sixties. Even in her nineties, she refused to the last to walk with a stick and preferred “furniture walking” instead! She had wanted to be a nurse and was desperate to be a Land Girl—going away from home to live and work on the farms while the men were at war. But her class and her father wouldn’t allow it. So, as many women like her did, she put her strength and sense of service into her family, her housework, and her friends instead.

During World War II, Doris married Albert Hargreaves at very short notice, when he received his papers for posting to Egypt (though, at the last minute, flat feet spared him from probable death, and he was posted to British coastal defences instead).³² Albert was seven years older and seemed reliable and steady. But my mum’s father still disapproved of them getting married and was convinced that my dad’s papers were forged. He stubbornly refused to come to the wedding until the very last minute—something he repeated with his youngest son, Raymond, many years later. Doris fought her dad to marry my dad, and, as in many of her other life’s battles, she prevailed.

Albert was the youngest son of a clogger—a maker of wooden clogs for the local mill workers. He was supporting his mother, by then a widow, who, with an arm mangled by factory machinery, lived on a disability allowance. Albert’s mum was heartbroken when she heard he was going to get married. She had imagined he would look after her for the rest of her life. Albert was quiet and calm. A dispensing chemist, or pharmacist, with a grammar school education, and good with numbers, he rose quickly to become a sergeant major in the Royal Artillery.³³

Doris gave birth to her three boys—Peter, Colin, and then me—all three years apart and first raised us in a rented terraced house round the corner from her mum. A few years ago, our old street gained notoriety when the local council took Brendan Rodgers, Liverpool Football Club’s former manager, to court for allegedly failing to maintain and repair a property he owned and rented out there. The case was dropped when the council didn’t file its paperwork in time!³⁴

Though wartime was over, rationing and austerity were still realities, so life didn’t get much easier. The front-room floor was a threadbare carpet square spread across green linoleum. The stone-paved kitchen was separated from the front room by an old army blanket our dad had brought home when he was demobbed, or demobilized, from the military—the earliest memory from my childhood. For my mum—and all the town’s working-class women like her—maintaining a clean home was a constant struggle. For all but two weeks a year, when most families left for their annual holidays, the factory furnaces and the coal fires in people’s homes kept the town under a thick pall of smoke and ash.³⁵

By the mid-1950s, Britain’s postwar welfare state brought benefits to our family as it did to many others. We may only have been able to afford to move house on the back of the coalman’s lorry, but going up to the council estate where my mum and dad had been offered a home gave us a bath, a garden, and privet hedges.³⁶

Typical of many postwar parents, Doris and Albert wanted to ensure their children had opportunities. School uniforms and caps were always spick and span. My older brothers went across town for violin lessons. And the annual holiday to the seaside by steam train was the treat for which Doris saved up all year—a week in Southport, three holidays in a row in Fleetwood, and, most exotically, even one overseas trip to the Isle of Man. Mum wouldn’t buy this on tick, or credit. “If you can’t pay for it, you shouldn’t have it,” she’d always say. She often worked two or three jobs—childminding, cleaning, and shop work—to acquire those extras and make ends meet.³⁷

Many of these habits and values have stayed with me all my life. Work hard. Don’t expect things to come easily. Seize your opportunities. Make sacrifices. Never get into debt. Value a good education. Persist. But, whatever happens, always take and enjoy your holidays.