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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Jean Baggott is 'the girl on the wall' - a 1948 photograph taken of her when she was eleven - whose life was never going to be remarkable and the pinnacle of whose achievements would come from being a wife and a mother. Almost 60 years later, with her children gone, dealing with the loss of the love of her life, Jean began the education denied to her as a girl. Inspired by ceilings of Lincolnshire's Burghley House and by the History degree she had begun, Jean began to stitch a tapestry which looked back at her life and the changing world around her. It took sixteen months to complete. The tapestry consists of over 70 intersecting circles, each telling some aspect of her life. Some represent extraordinary events such as the moon landings or world historical news stories like the Cuban Missile Crisis; some circles comment on famous people and places she remembers, others about the music she loves - Pink Floyd - and the games she played as a child, and growing up during the second world war with her brothers. Each chapter of "The Girl on the Wall" features a circle from the tapestry and Jean's accompanying narrative, exploring the circle and the memories it evokes. It reveals an ordinary life in extraordinary detail. The result is a truly unique, touching portrait of a seemingly average British woman's life. To stand back and look at the tapestry is to be struck by the richness of one human journey - from 1940 to the present day. The girl on the wall would be proud. The book includes a full-colour pull-out of Jean's tapestry inside the back cover.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Previously published in the UK in 2009 and 2011
by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,
39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP
email: [email protected]
www.iconbooks.co.uk
This electronic edition published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-84831-288-3 (ePub format) ISBN: 978-1-84831-289-0 (Adobe ebook format)
Printed edition (ISBN 978-184831-189-3)
sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia
by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA
or their agents
Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia
by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,
Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW
Printed edition published in Australia in 2011
by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,
PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,
Crows Nest, NSW 2065
Text copyright © 2009 Jean Baggott The author has asserted her moral rights.
Tapestry photography © Scott Wishart
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Book design by Simmons Pugh
To Angela for her skill at keeping my memory bank open
and for inspired suggestions such as ‘Z’ for Zaire; and to
Jim for giving me the rugby ball together with the benefit
of his vast knowledge of many things.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Roger Fagge, University of Warwick
Preface
Circle 1: MEMORIES BEGIN
The street in which I was born, with a description of the houses, factories, people and working-class lives
Circle 2: BURGHLEY HOUSE
The origin of the tapestry – how the idea evolved from the ceiling in the billiard room
Circle 3: HAWKERS, DEALERS AND PEDDLERS
Door-to-door selling from handcarts and horses and carts
Circle 4–7, 23 and 25–28: THE FAMILY
Personal family memories
Circle 8: PINK FLOYD
What the band’s music means to me
Circle 9: RATIONING AND SHORTAGES
How we managed and how long the situation lasted
Circle 10: DECORATING
The entertainment that could be derived from a ‘ball’ of whitewash and a tin of ‘wallop’
Circle 11: THE FORTIES
World events and social and personal history in this ten-year period
Circle 12: ADVERTISING
The advertising of items that were not for sale during the war and the bare-faced lies that were used to sell goods after it, before new laws were passed
Circle 13: BATTLES AND WARS
From 1940 to the Tet Offensive, the end of the Cold War and the wars that followed
Circle 14: CHRISTMAS
Simple family fun in another age
Circle 15: DIETING
How this phenomenon developed into the multimillion-pound industry it is today
Circle 16: THE EVERGREENS
A local concert party
Circle 17: THE FIELDS
A vast piece of land containing a derelict engine house, a large pond, a brick works, several pit holes, a brook and slag heaps
Circle 18: COMMUNICATION
How we managed without clocks, telephones, cars and all the technology that we have today
Circle 19: HANGINGS
There was a murderer hanged every fortnight on average
Circle 20: ICONS
The people I have admired from my lifetime
Circle 21: IN PASSING
Various things that have caused a stir and then disappeared such as the Rubik’s cube, the hula hoop and the mini-skirt
Circle 22: FIRES
In wartime and beyond – including one which shows how the working class could deal with problems
Circle 24: RADIO
The importance of this medium as entertainment when there was little else
Circle 29: POWER OF MEMORY
A remarkable example
Circle 30: PATENT MEDICINES
Anything would be tried before you bothered the doctor
Circle 31: STREET GAMES
Having fun which cost nothing
Circle 32: TALES
Of valour and murder, as related by our parents
Circle 33: JEWELS OF WISDOM
Scraps of advice which I still bandy about today
Circle 34: MOM’S KITCHEN
A small room with a lot to tell
Circle 35: THE LORD OF THE RINGS
What the films mean to me
Circle 36: MARBERRY
An example of enterprise
Circle 37: PARKS
How we used them
Circle 38: NETLEY
A village on Southampton Water: deals with the Suez Crisis in 1956
Circle 39: THE OLYMPICS
Since Foxhunter we do much better these days
Circle 40: THE PARTY YARD
A system that had a lot going for it
Circle 41: QUEUES
A fact of life then and now
Circle 42: COPING WITH THE WEATHER
The problems of 1947, thunderstorms and summer days when a bunch of small children had nothing to fear
Circle 43: WASHING DAY
How washing was a whole day’s work; and the joys of taking things to the ‘cleaners’
Circle 44: BONFIRES
In changing times
Circle 45: EDUCATION
Roughly covering 1941 to the present day and the consequences of Butler’s Education Act of 1944
Circle 46: RECORDED MUSIC
Those who came and went and those who stayed
Circle 47: DAD
I could not have written this book without him
Circle 48: MOM
I could not write about one without including the other
Circle 49: MOON LANDING
Apollo 11 and the ‘iron curtain’
Circle 50: SCHOOL TRIPS
Days out that didn’t always go to plan
Circle 51: MAKE DO AND MEND
How to repair a shoe with an old car tyre and make a ‘bum freezer’
Circle 52: THE FIFTIES
World events, social and personal history in this ten-year period
Circle 53: THE SIXTIES
World events, social and personal history in this ten-year period
Circle 54: RELIGION
When you’re down in the dumps and feeling all alone
Circle 55: SUNDAYS
The trials and tribulations of family weekends and the ways in which this day has changed
Circle 56: TELEVISION
From Nineteen Eighty-Four to Big Brother
Circle 57: UNDER
Taking shelter during threatened air raids under the stairs and the Morrison shelter and in the church hall
Circle 58: VICTORY
A sorry story of what victory was like for some
Circle 59: WARWICK
At last – finding what I hadn’t realised was so important to me
Circle 60: EXTREMES
Extreme tragedies caused by weapons, storms and acts of terrorism
Circle 61: YANKS AND THE COOK SHOP
Even we did not escape from the influx of American servicemen – and why my nose still twitches
Circle 62: ZAIRE
The importance of Muhammad Ali to the civil rights movement
Circle 63: THE SEVENTIES
World events, social and personal history in this ten-year period
Circle 64: THE EIGHTIES
World events, social and personal history in this ten-year period
Circle 65: CINEMA
How the cinema and its audience have changed in the last 60 years
Circle 66: THE NINETIES
World events, social and personal history in this ten-year period
Circle 67: ILLNESS
The trauma of childhood illness
Circle 68: SOUTHAMPTON WATER
Watching the liners and other major ships going to and from the docks, including Forrestal
Circle 69: AIRCRAFT
My observations of important aircraft from the Lancaster to Concorde
Circle 70: HOBBIES
You will have gathered by now that I am incapable of sitting with idle hands
Circle 71: POLITICIANS
Never trusted them, never will
Circle 72: THE NOUGHTIES
World events, social and personal history from 2000 to 2006
Circle 73: WOMEN’S CLOTHING
From the Liberty bodice to Christmas pudding moulds
Epilogue
FOREWORD
I first met Jean when she took one of my courses on twentieth-century American history, and was immediately impressed by her enthusiastic embrace of her subject. I admired Jean’s willingness to participate in class discussions with students much younger than herself, as well as her love of music – as evidenced by her iPod. Several discussions resulted and we discovered a shared love of various acts, including the magnificent Pink Floyd. Jean is a great conversationalist, and it also came to light that she had grown up during the 1940s in West Bromwich, a town which is often described in less than flattering terms.
Some time later Jean, rather tentatively, brought in her tapestry to show me. As she explained the autobiographical rationale behind her work, my eyes were drawn to the detail in each of the circles, and the story that they told. There was no doubt that this was something very special, something that demanded a wider audience. The visual representation of a life in this form was innovative and intriguing. However, it was the way that the circles captured the experience of an ‘ordinary’ life in a period of such historical change that made the greatest impact. The circles mix the personal, social, cultural and political, avoiding a straight narrative in favour of a thematic representation of a life. And they reveal that the ‘ordinary’ is quite frequently extraordinary; that it can contain imagination, courage, humour and personal discovery. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, this is something that is all too often forgotten; Jean’s work serves as a timely reminder.
Roger Fagge Department of History, University of Warwick
The Girl on the Wall: The school portrait of me aged eleven, in 1948, that started it all
PREFACE
At the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1999, I stood in my sitting room and looked long and hard at the girl on the wall. This is a school photograph of me taken when I was eleven which I have re-created in needlework.
When I looked at her that night I saw a girl full of promise, eager to embrace the future. But, in truth, even at the tender age of eleven I was destined never to do anything remarkable. I was a product of ‘her’ time, and had always known my place: the pinnacle of my achievements would come from being a wife and mother. Although I tried hard to find fulfilment in other ways, I had never quite found what I was looking for.
I was born in 1937 in a heavily industrialised area known as the Black Country, which spilled through three counties: Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Many towns in these counties looked the same: they consisted of cramped living conditions and factories all covered with a layer of grime. This doesn’t mean I was born on the side of a slag heap or that we kept coal in the bath. Indeed, having a bath to keep the coal in would have been a luxury. Our bath hung on a nail in the yard by the back door.
I have never been able to forget my life of that time and have no desire to. My recollections of the area, our street and the people are still very clear but it is the house which holds the most memories. I was born there and lived with my parents and two brothers, Ted and Jim. We led very simple lives and many of my most treasured memories come from this simplicity. Through-out the country there were millions of families who struggled through the war to keep what was theirs, and who struggled after the war in an attempt to get back to some semblance of normality. My parents moved into the house in 1931 and left in 1962, during a massive campaign of so-called slum clearance when the houses were demolished.
By this time only my younger brother Jim was still living at home with Mom and Dad, and they were re-housed in a flat. Neither parent was ever the same after that. The masses were manipulated into believing that being slotted into high-rise blocks of flats was for their own good. It was the same throughout the country as millions of people were transplanted. It was declared that these moves were all part of the great plan which would culminate in the creation of the New Jerusalem and would lead to better lives.
When my parents left the house Britannia no longer ruled: the Suez crisis in 1956 had put Britain well and truly in its place. Things we had known all our lives began to disappear. The fields had gone. Factories had been built on the land and expressways ensured that traffic could flow freely. Keeping the traffic flowing has always come at a terrible cost. In bulldozing all of these little streets the authorities robbed many who had lived in them of community spirit, as they were scattered in all directions.
But I and others of my age, and younger, saw it all as progress. It became normal to want to own your own house, with a garden and a nice family car. It became normal for the woman of the house to work to help pay for it all. Going to work and still having the responsibilities of a wife and mother would mean that she also needed a car. Technology and the new ‘must have’ gadgets would ensure that she became enslaved in the process.
By the end of the last millennium I could look back on a life spent putting everyone before myself. Most people do, and there is nothing wrong with self-sacrifice. But there does come a point when it is necessary to think about yourself. I reached this point as the twentieth century was becoming history. By then, I had already developed the habit of discussing my problems with the girl on the wall and would share bits of news with her, much as I had done with my husband Ray before he died. As I stood there, eye to eye with my younger self while the clock struck midnight on the eve of the new millennium, I promised her that from then on my life would be dedicated to making her happy. At that moment my life took on a new meaning. I moved forward and have never looked back. Everything I have done since I’ve done for her, for the girl I was then.
In the late nineties I had finally begun the arduous task of getting the education that had been denied to the girl on the wall. After spending four years at Warwickshire College doing, among other things, a university access course, I was rewarded with a place at the University of Warwick. I began work on a history degree and will hopefully graduate in 2010. While it would be rather conceited of me to be proud of myself, I feel I am allowed to be proud of her.
The course at Warwick has helped me to put all my memories into the context of world history. From being an old woman with a habit of keeping her head down and her mouth shut, lest her naïve opinions betray her ignorance, I’ve learned how to think about history and express myself with confidence. I’ve learned that many of my opinions are valid, and that they might even be of interest to others. It’s been hard work but I do it for the girl on the wall who was destined to live through a slice of history whose significance is already being deliberated.
When it comes to life stories I have always thought that mine is as interesting as anyone else’s. From about the age of 25, I would spend a couple of months every year writing feverishly away, attempting to capture for posterity the finer details of a working-class life. But, as nobody showed any real interest in what I was doing, my efforts always ended up in the bin. This went on for 40 years. At the turn of the century I decided that if I did not record now how I had lived my life it would be the greatest loss to world history, ever! I felt much better after that and was able to concentrate on my studies again.
Inspiration struck after I saw the ceiling in the billiard room at Burghley House in Lincolnshire in May 2006. It had been created in an ornate plasterwork design of interlocking circles that looked like a perfect template for a piece of needlework. When the idea for the ‘circles of life’ came to me the next morning (see Circle 2) I rubbed my hands together with glee, and nodded happily in the direction of the girl on the wall. This was more like it.
I threaded my first needle on 1 June 2006 and completed the last stitch on 8 October 2007. By the time the tapestry was finished I was amazed at the journey it had taken me on. It made me realise that, although I’ve lived a very ordinary life, it has not lacked richness. I was also impressed by the effect the tapestry had on others, especially my son-in-law Mark and his colleague Harry, who would drop by occasionally when in Warwick on business. They had watched its progress with interest, something I had not expected from men. I became aware that they and others who saw it wanted to know more about the meanings of its symbols. I started to write short pieces to accompany each circle, although as you will see I did not explain every single detail on the tapestry for the simple reason that there are so many of them. Before too long, I was wondering if this wouldn’t make an interesting book.
The book you now hold in your hands would not have amounted to much without the efforts of all those who taught me the things I know, from Miss Cook with her pink thread to Roger Fagge at the University of Warwick, whose words have influenced me greatly. Throughout the needlework and the writing it was reassuring to know I could always bank on my daughter Angela’s thoughts on any subject. I must also thank Ann Hume who allowed me to be excited when she herself had so much to be excited about. I’m grateful to Betty Warner and all my friends at Leek Wootton who have supported me through my education and continue to do so. My sincerest regards go to Joyce James who can always find wise words when I need them most. I would like to thank Margaret Minty and Marian Bennett who, I hope, will understand, and of course, Ethel Skerratt.
I am deeply indebted to my son Jim, without whose help my life notes would again have ended up in the bin. I have appreciated so much his editorial advice and support and for introducing me to the team at Icon Books. I’m grateful to Kate Agnew and Sarah Higgins, Andrew Furlow, Najma Finlay and Simon Flynn at Icon for their faith in the project and for making me feel so warmly welcome. The book has greatly benefited from the photography of Scott Wishart, the cover design by Rose Cooper and the design and typesetting skills of Oliver Pugh.
I am grateful to everyone I have mentioned here. Their wisdom, expertise and abilities have given me support that have made the book possible. I am deeply aware that the girl and I could not have done it alone.
The circles that can be seen in the following chapters are reproduced at 90% of their actual size.
– CIRCLE 1 –
MEMORIES BEGIN
It has been said that everyone has two births: their natural birth and the birth of their conscious life. The birth of my conscious life came in 1940 when my ability to remember began. Some of my memories are just to do with family but many are about the world in which I have lived. There are good memories and bad. They begin in a very humble house in a very humble street which represented a way of life for millions.
The street was just one of thousands that made up an area known as the Black Country. In those days it belonged to another world compared to today. There was a public house on the right-hand corner and the Bentley family lived in the house on the other corner. A little further down the street on the left-hand side was a terrace of six houses with an arched entry, rather like a narrow tunnel, which ran through the middle and led to the party yard1 at the back. At the top of the yard were three lava-tories and three wash houses which were shared between the houses. The first three houses had a cellar but water had to be fetched from one of the wash houses. The other three houses each had a tap in the kitchen but no cellar.
Our house had a tap. By the end of the 1940s the rent for a house with a tap was eleven shillings (55p) a week and the rent for a house with a cellar was eight shillings (40p) a week. In the early fifties one family was re-housed and the landlord put their house up for sale. It was snapped up for £450. Mother commented at the time that she ‘didn’t know who had bought it, but they must have wanted some oil in their lamp paying for a house like that.’
Opposite our house was a double-fronted cottage where a Mrs Jenkins lived with her two grown-up daughters. The rest of the street, on both sides, was made up of seven large factories. My elder brother Ted, younger brother Jim and I enjoyed a great deal of freedom. For example, we could go for miles in search of adventure. If we intended to go off to some distant area we were given a bag of emergency rations, usually bread and scrape2 and a bottle of water, with the reminder to be sensible. We could be gone all day and Mother didn’t have to worry about us. We were told not to take risks. Now, when I look back, I realise that we were surrounded by risks and we didn’t always see them.
Next door to our house was a factory which made caterpillar tracks for tanks during the war. The street at that time was in a bad state. The war department would regularly send a tank so that tracks could be tested. There was no road surface and no pavement – just mud, potholes and small rocks. We never had street lights. During bad weather we would step out from the front door straight into a quagmire. After the war the factory was taken over by another company, the road was surfaced and a pavement put in. After this, by six o’clock every evening – when all the factories had closed for the day and there was no traffic – the street became our playground and we were joined by youngsters from other streets. With no houses at the bottom end of the street we could make as much noise as we wanted and disturbed no one.
Everyone in the area and beyond lived in streets made up of two-up-two-down houses and was working class, so you knew where you stood. There were the odd one or two families who thought they were a cut above the rest of us but, as Mother said: ‘You can tell them a mile off. The men are full of their own importance while the women walk as if their knees have been welded together. In their primness they’re old beyond their years and always look as if they’ve just sucked a lemon.’
I remained in the street until I married in 1955. I had lived there through a period of great change. There had been the hustle and bustle of wartime with its attendant misery, shortages, making do and pulling together. However, this was always accompanied by hope and, for the children, the certain knowledge that God was on our side and we would win the war. With the end of the war came the realisation that things would have to get worse before they could get better. And they did. By the time I left the house there had been another war, this time in Korea, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, and several skirmishes worldwide. However, rationing had come to an end at last, ballpoint pens had been invented and we now had plastic washing-up bowls and buckets. I was led to believe that things were now back to ‘normal’.
What a let-down. After all that misery we had a plastic bowl, a bucket and a biro. While the children might have been optimistic and free throughout the period, the adults had not. They had suffered twelve to fourteen years of strife, hard work and worry. For many of them what should have been the best years of their lives had gone. These days, when I hear people going on about the grim state of the world we live in today, I remind them that it cannot possibly be worse than the one I was born into.
1 A party yard was an area shared by all the houses and could not in any respect be called a garden (see circle 40). Children were not allowed to play in this area because it would annoy the neighbours.
2 Scrape, familiar to most people my age, was margarine that had been put on a slice of bread and then scraped off again.
– CIRCLE 2 –
BURGHLEY HOUSE
It was in the billiard room at Burghley House in Lincolnshire that the idea for the tapestry began. It was 17 May 2006 and I was on an outing for the day with my friend Betty. In the billiard room other people were looking at the furnishings and paintings, but my eyes were drawn to the ceiling and stayed there. It was designed with an intricate plasterwork pattern of interlocking circles. I knew I could create something using its outline in needlework but what could I possibly make? The walls of my home were already crowded with various samplers and floral scenes and I had no room for any more cushions.
The following day, while drinking my early morning cup of tea at the table in my sitting room, an idea began to form in my mind. What about a table cover? I imagined this as something that would fit only the top of the table without overhanging on any side. The subject would have to be interesting and something that one could associate with circles. The idea that was more prominent than any other in my mind was ‘the circles of life’; and so it was decided. I would sew circles, containing details of my life. Then I would be able to sit every morning and contemplate what I had lived through.
I have been a needlewoman from childhood and eventually became capable of doing everything from delicate needlework to re-upholstering a sofa. To create the circles the basis of the pattern consists of ovals and squares which took 36,992 stitches to form; only then could the serious work begin.
Each circle is three and three eights of an inch in diameter and the whole piece measures 44 inches by sixteen. I started in the middle, with the circle about Parks (Circle 37) and then completed the first set of circles that surround this. I carried on like this until the circle on the Lord of the Rings (Circle 35), which I consider to be one of the best. Then I began completing circles first to the left and then to the right. It all became something of an obsession. During this time, apart from looking after myself and my home, I was also studying for a history degree, writing essays and sitting exams. By the time I finished this piece of work on 8 October 2007 I had had 63 years of immense pleasure from threading a needle, but nothing else gave me the satisfaction that I found in doing this.
In the tapestry there are 73 circles representing people, places and events in my lifetime, taken from between January 1940 and December 2006. The four corners serve as reminders of my education and my pride in being British. Around the edges of the tapestry are 22 half-circles which represent people I simply would not like to forget. Two are memorials to friends I have lost. One shows the men who tramped to work every day to the factories in the street. Others remind me of friends from my earlier years. Some are representative of my friends at Leek Wootton. All of these people are remembered with pleasure. And there is one, the girl on the wall, who has become essential.
‘The girl on the wall’ refers to a black-and-white photograph of me taken at school when I was eleven. A few years ago I produced an enlarged version of this picture in needlework, and this now hangs in my living room. I can remember exactly what the girl was thinking when the photo was taken, and know just what made her happy and what made her sad.
She had always been part of my life but since the first day of January 2000, the day I decided to think more about the things that matter to her, she has given my life balance and a reason to be kinder to myself. Having lived most of my life for others, at the beginning of the new millennium, at the age of 63, I decided to live more for myself.
In giving consideration to her I am finally putting myself first, and she makes it easier to do things for me rather than always doing things for other people. Ours is a relationship with tremendous advantages: it is impossible to talk about her behind her back. Not only is she the sort of friend I can berate to her face without fear of offence, but I can also overcome my feelings of regret at a frivolous yet expensive purchase by deciding that I’m buying it for the girl on the wall. Special treats do us the world of good and even an occasional guilt-laden, toffee-flavoured ice cream can be eaten without remorse, because I am eating it for her. We have our good days and our bad days but, given a nice cup of tea, we can cope with anything.
– CIRCLE 3 –
HAWKERS, DEALERS AND PEDDLERS
Handcarts and horse-drawn carts were still an important method of selling goods when I was a child. In fact handcarts had many uses. A man in the lane owned two which he kept by the front of his house and rented out to those who needed them. They were used by people who were flitting (moving from one set of rooms to another) or those moving to a new house. Both of these might involve several journeys and I would imagine that the charge for these would have depended on how long you needed them for.
Periodically, a man would come to sharpen knives and scissors using a foot-controlled, battery-driven grindstone. This would be mounted on a small handcart together with other tools, and I believe he did small repairs and other jobs with these tools which the layman was incapable of doing.
While everyone relied on coal for heating the home many, including Mom, also used it for cooking and baking. There were several coal merchants and they did varying degrees of trade in summer and winter. One of them still used a heavy horse-drawn cart for his deliveries; the horse was the most docile of creatures who, while the men ran up and down the entry to the yard doing their work, would stand unmoving while we made a fuss of him. When the work was finished one of the men would reach into a paper bag on the cart, tell us to stand back, and then hold whatever was in his hand to the horse’s mouth. As the horse started munching, they would pull away.
The fish man came round with his handcart on a regular basis. On the cart were three or four enormous slabs of ice on which would be displayed pieces of fish. In the warm weather you could smell him both coming and long after he had gone because of the drips from his cart as he arrived, the puddle that he left in the road and the drips as he left.
The salt man also used a handcart in which he carried very large blocks of salt. Using a large knife, which was similar to a small machete, he would chop a chunk from one of the blocks and then, by guesswork, decide what it was worth and sell it to you. Having made your purchase you would take it home and, using a grater, reduce it to a usable condiment. He would come round every three or four months and on one of these visits Mom decided to buy some salt from him. On this occasion he had much difficulty breaking a chunk from the block and could only do so in the end by using a saw. Even then it was not an easy task. At this point Mom should have given some consideration as to why he had thought it necessary to bring a saw with him, but she didn’t. Having got the salt home I was given the task of grating it but, no matter how hard I tried, I had no effect on it. It was the same for Mom. She then decided that the rogue must have kept the main block somewhere damp and it had dried like concrete. The next time she heard his cry of ‘salt’, Mom was ready for him and, after much deliberation and threat, she got her money back.
The pig man arrived on a horse-drawn trap to collect everybody’s waste food to be used as pig swill. He would be seated quite high at the front and behind him were dustbins without lids for the waste collection. He was always accompanied by a cloud of flies and, in today’s parlance, the smell was gross.
The rag and bone man would also do his rounds on a horse and cart, and a bundle of old rags would buy you either three clothes pegs or a balloon. The women were allowed to rummage through the rags on his cart and if they found anything that they could use he would sell it to them. Eventually he made enough money to buy a small lorry and gave up collecting rags in favour of scrap metal. He became a very rich man.
Mom was not happy with the gypsies who displayed what they had to sell in a basket hung over their arm. She didn’t like them because she knew that the bits of ribbon and elastic and haberdashery items in the basket were greatly overpriced, but she felt obliged to buy from them because, if she didn’t, they would give her the ‘evil eye’, and she had enough trouble coping with life without bringing more misfortune down on herself. She saw it as a form of terrorism on her own doorstep.
– CIRCLE 4 –7, 23 and 25–28 –
THE FAMILY
When I began work on the tapestry I did not give a moment’s thought to the notion that I would eventually write about each circle or that the writing would be published. The tapestry was intended for my own pleasure, and I naturally composed circles devoted to my immediate family because family has always been a powerful force in my life.
These family circles are as laden with meaning as any of the others. The individual designs captured in each family circle refer to memories of events in our shared lives and achievements of theirs of which I am especially proud. However, not only are many of these memories intimate and personal, they are also rather domestic, and I fear that my writing about them would become the thinly-disguised boastings of a very proud woman. I have therefore chosen not to write about these circles and hope that the reader will understand. Circles number 4, 7 and 25 to 28 reflect the lives of my son Jim and daughter Angela and their families, who all feature briefly in some of my yarns.
I have made an exception for Mom and Dad in circles 47 and 48 because they loomed too large in my childhood for me to be able to exclude them. My brothers Ted and Jim also feature in many of the stories behind other circles. Brother Ted died in 1993 so I have checked with brother Jim that he is comfortable with me telling stories of our childhood together, even though in Circle 30 I quote Mother’s reference to him as ‘a miserable little bugger’, which at the time he was.
All of which leads me to my lovely Ray, who could always be relied upon to say the right thing. I filled two circles with memories of him – Circles 5 and 6 – and you will find them in the place where he was always at his happiest – in the cinema – in Circle 65.
– CIRCLE 8 –
PINK FLOYD
It was in the seventies that I first heard the music of Pink Floyd. I was in a record shop and heard something extraordinary playing in the background. I asked at the counter what it was and, after finding out more about the group, I bought it. The album was Meddle and the track that had done it for me was called ‘One of These Days’. After playing the album at home I was also impressed with the 28-minute track ‘Echoes’, and I have been a committed fan ever since.
This was a time when progressive rock music was at its peak and I was already familiar with the work of Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson and other groups. However Pink Floyd, as far as I was concerned, had the edge by then. Ray could not hear in them what I did but I was not surprised. His taste never extended beyond Frankie Laine. While I could also appreciate Mr Laine I have always believed a little variety never hurt anyone. Ray had always been tone deaf and when Pink Floyd was playing would always ask: ‘What do they have to keep singing for?’ But over the years he gradually got used to them.
They had been around since the early sixties using a number of names such as The Abdabs and The Megadeaths. All of these names seemed to reflect the flippant mood of the sixties. Syd Barrett, a founder member of the group, thought up the name Pink Floyd after seeing the names of blues singers Pink Anderson and Floyd Council in a descriptive piece on the back of an album sleeve. The Pink Floyd of that time are remembered for being a prominent group in the London underground scene; they were a very popular house band at the Roundhouse in Camden and featured prominently in the ‘psychedelic’ period. They had had some success in 1967 with the singles ‘Arnold Lane’ and ‘See Emily Play’, but this stuff was not for me.
I can listen to any sort of music, be it classical, middle of the road, heavy metal or pop (see Circle 46), but the work of this group has a hold over me like no other. In world rankings their album Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most renowned and best-selling of all time. I can only listen to their work with the volume set at ‘ear-splitting’ so headphones are mostly needed. It has got me through black days, and days of jubilation and celebration when there has been no one there to share my feelings with. When I have had enough on miserable days Pink Floyd will snap me back to a mood of defiance and when my simmering temper has climbed to boiling point, half an hour of their music will turn off the power and return me to ‘normal’. There were a couple of occasions, while I was having a lengthy phone conversation with someone who always brought out the worst in me, when Ray would stand by the music centre with my favourite disc set up and ready, waiting for the conversation to end so that he could throw the switch.
Although in the circle I reproduced the mirror ball (which opens up into petals) that Pink Floyd used in many of their later concerts, I never actually saw the group live. The nearest I got to seeing them was at the Royal Albert Hall when I was taken by my son to see the tribute band Australian Pink Floyd. They were at their very best that night. We had seen them before, but that particular night they were faultless. They played all of my favourite tracks and at the end of one the standing ovation was overwhelming. To say merely that their music has an effect on me is an understatement. And in this instance even the word ‘understatement’ is completely inadequate. I listened to them continuously as my work on the tapestry progressed and their music will be played when I ‘pop off’ to meet my maker.
– CIRCLE 9 –
RATIONING AND SHORTAGES
For me rationing was a way of life and I had never known anything other than a life of shortages. The system of trying to ensure equal shares for all was up and running as far back as I could remember, and would stay there until we were into the fifties. The suspension of restrictions on various items was a long, slow process and ration books were not formally dispensed with until 1954.
Mother was an absolute whiz at spinning out the meagre rations and we never went hungry. She didn’t bother experimenting with any of the fancy recipes thought up by the brains who worked with the government’s Ministry of Food. These were supposed to fool you into thinking that you were having some rare delicacy when you were not. For example, she could not see the point of ruining a perfectly good parsnip which could, according to some recipe or other, become a banana. Plain and simple but filling was the rule in our house.
The rule also extended to fresh foods in preference to processed. Although we did get used to omelettes made with dried egg, nothing could replace the taste or versatility of a real egg. We had National dried egg, National dried milk for babies and National margarine which Dad called ‘axle grease’. He also believed that sausages were one of life’s mysteries, in that it was difficult to figure out what was actually in them. However, there was no mistaking one ingredient: bread. There was so much bread in a sausage that the minute it was put into a hot frying pan, it would burst open. To counteract this, the manufacturers began making sausages with a thicker skin which was extremely tough, so we got into the habit of removing the skin altogether before cooking.
Bread was a very good filler, at least when it was both available and edible. As the war dragged on we were confronted with ‘the grey loaf’, which had a high chalk content. It was 35 per cent cattle food. Mother said it was like chewing asbestos and it tasted ghastly. Toasting it only made it a little more palatable. Bread was never rationed during the war but it was from 21 July 1946. It would remain rationed for about a year. Now, all these years later, it is believed that this was unnecessary and was only done at the time in an attempt to convince America that the nation was starving and we needed more help.
While it is true that our family never went hungry, don’t be alarmed by the fly in the circle. We did not eat them but they came in very handy at the end of a meal. If we were still peckish, then one reply to the question: ‘Have you had enough?’ was guaranteed to get you something more to eat. If you replied in a small, trembling voice with the words, ‘I’m just beginning to feel as if I’ve snapped at a fly and missed it’, you were quickly offered something else.
Like everything that had to come from abroad, oranges were a luxury. A woman in the lane asked me if I would do some heavy lifting for her. Afterwards she took me into her front room and told me to take an orange from her fruit bowl on the table. I remember thinking at the time that it was unusual for someone to have so many oranges when there were none in the shops. I also remember thinking that the one I chose felt a bit funny in that it was very hard. When I got home I cut through it with a knife – it was as dry as sawdust and completely inedible.
Everyone from that period seems to recall their first sighting of a banana. Mine was probably in 1947 and was both exciting and disappointing. I had been sent to a local shop on an errand. As I went in I could not help noticing a large plain wooden box on the floor, looking suspiciously like a coffin. The shopkeeper lifted the lid and, using a knife, cut off a bunch of five bananas from a stem that ran the length of the container. He handed them to me and said: ‘Take these to your mother. Tell her I will put the cost on her bill.’ As I waited to cross the road a passing cyclist, noticing the bananas I held proudly aloft, fell off his bike. Sadly, after years of hearing about them, I was not impressed with the taste and am still not keen on them, though I eat one every day because of their nutritional properties.
We never got used to ‘Pom’, ‘Spam’ and ‘Snoek’. Pom was powdered potato similar to that which can be bought today but tasting nothing like it. ‘Spam’ was a kind of tinned luncheon meat which tasted ghastly and we would only eat it if it was fried. Snoek made an appearance in 1948 after the government ordered 10 million tins of it from South Africa. It was rumoured that snoek was a ferocious fish which hissed like a snake and barked like a dog when it was in a temper. A half-pound tin cost 1s 4d, and used up only one ration point as opposed to fourteen for red salmon and six for pink salmon. In August 1949 a further 8 million tins arrived from Australia which were labelled as barracuda, but the contents tasted like snoek.1 In 1951 much of it was re-labelled and sold as cat food for ten pence a tin but the majority of it was probably used as fertiliser. In the summer of 1947 whale meat was introduced, although Mother wouldn’t have anything to do with it. It had limited success but by early 1950 there were still 4,000 tons of it in storage lying unwanted, in cans.
During the early months of the fifties restrictions on milk were removed. This was followed by flour, eggs and soap. Sweets were among the last things to come off the ration, although some alternatives were available long before then. For instance, you could buy a soft toffee, but it was not as good as the rationed one which was commonly known as ‘stick-jaw’ and had to be broken up with a hammer. When chewing an excessively large piece one’s jaws could become welded together and a finger would be needed to manoeuvre the offending chunk around the mouth. Anyone’s finger would do in an emergency.
When ration books were finally scrapped I quietly put away my sweet coupons together with a threepenny (3d) bit. I had long ago learned that one was no good without the other and three old pennies were sufficient for two ounces of liquorice comforts. In putting away both I was ensuring that, if hostilities suddenly flared up again, I would be ready. I still have them.
When thinking about rationing most people of today’s generation would naturally think that it applied only to food. This was not the case. Along with a ration book for food we also had a book of clothing coupons. All clothing, household linen and furniture had restrictions of some sort, and all of these would carry a utility mark which established that the item in question met government guidelines in its manufacturing process. Blankets and many other items could only be bought if you applied for a docket. I still have a label from a wartime blanket which shows a utility mark and has the ‘set in concrete’ selling price of 37s 6d (£1.87) printed on it.
Both cigarettes and razor blades were hard to find and it was as well to keep in with a local shopkeeper. It was easy to tell when Dad needed a new blade. If, after shaving, there were no bits of paper stuck to his face, the blade was in good condition. If there were five or six we would know he was getting desperate. The better known brands of cigarettes – Woodbines, Park Drive, Craven A, Players or Senior Service – were kept under the counter. Dad’s preferred brand was Woodbines, which were known as ‘coffin nails’. These were often in such short supply that they were sold in packs of five so that more customers could have their fix. The brand that was readily available was Pasha, a ‘gasper’ in the proper sense and believed to be capable of rotting your socks. These were Egyptian and the smell of them burning was enough to put anyone off.
Dad usually had to work on Sunday mornings. One Sunday, when he came home just after noon he gave Ted some money and told us to go off on our scooters and get him some cigarettes. We were told not to come home until we had some. We eventually managed to get him five from a little shop in Aston. When we got back, we found that he and Mom had been very worried about us. He had been joking when he said ‘Don’t come back till you find some.’ I mention this only to show how little traffic there was on the roads then on Sundays. This was due to the chronic petrol shortage. To get to Aston, some five miles or more from home, we had used the main road through Birmingham and we were travelling on two home-made scooters.
If someone left a pile of builders’ sand unattended it would be pounced on by young women who would rub their legs with it, leaving them a bright orange colour. This was supposed to give the impression that they had a tan or were wearing silk stockings. Some went to the trouble of getting a friend to draw a seam down the back of each leg with a pencil in an attempt to fool others into believing that they were wearing the finest stockings. I doubt that they fooled anyone, and Mother said at the time: ‘I’d like to know what their bedclothes look like.’
In February 1946, the old wartime standby – dried egg – disappeared from the shops, but when national newspapers took up its cause the government grudgingly brought it back. After crop failures that year, the government urged farmers to plant again and offered them some of the 40,000 German prisoners of war who were being held in Britain to help. From January to July that year Europe was short of millions of tons of wheat. As 1946 drew to a close, something was approaching which would prove devastating to our beleaguered country. It would eventually test all of us to our limits.
The winter of 1947 began with a fall of snow on 16 December 1946. The winter would grip us quite mercilessly for months. By the end of January the country was paralysed. In March, 300 main roads were still impassable. A final storm on 16 March released floods which affected everything. These covered, at least in some part, 31 counties. About 600,000 acres of arable land disappeared underwater, destroying 80,000 tonnes of potatoes and 70,000 acres of other crops.2 We lost nearly a third of the country’s flocks of hill sheep and 30,000 head of cattle. London lost its fresh water supply and the Underground was closed. All of this was a devastating setback in our recovery programme and today, when historians discuss the winter of 1947, they talk mostly about the weather and not about its overwhelming consequences for a distressed and ravaged nation.
By 1948 rations had reached an all-time low and were even below the wartime offerings. Bacon and other meat, cheese, butter and margarine, cooking fat, sugar, tea and eggs would continue to be rationed for a long time to come, and queues still formed for things which were scarce. Today when I stand in a queue at a supermarket checkout I look at the overflowing trolleys and remember how hard people once worked on so little.
1 Michael Sissons and Philip French, eds., The Age of Austerity 1945–51 (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 54.
2 Michael Sissons and Philip French, eds., The Age of Austerity 1945–51 (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 51.
