From Christine Bate’s document titled Whitehill Life.doc

WHITEHILL LIFE

Contents

Fried onions for dinner:

Going out to play

Easter food 

Bath night

Radio

Harvest Festival

Mother’s Scarlet Fever

Bicycles

Post Office functions

Tonight I fried some onions for dinner.  Mother would have been surprised.

Many years ago, one sunny Saturday dinnertime, fried onions were one of the items on my plate.  I suppose the meat was fried liver, which I enjoyed.  I ate everything on my plate, as was expected, but the unexpected event was that I left the fried onions.  Why this became such a big issue is a mystery to me, but I was told that I had to eat them.  It was a summer day, and I could see out of the window in front of me as I sat at the table on my stool. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the air was fresh.  As I sat and looked at my plate, the onions became more and more revolting and soon the point was reached where I just could not eat them.  

There was a knock on the door.  I say the door, not the front or back door, because there was the only one door to the outside in our semi-detached house. The words, “Can Christine come and play?” echoed down the hall into the living room. Ominous words followed to the effect that I was not going to come out.  My heart sank, but I continued to sit and look at the onions, by now congealing on the plate with the brown edges looking less and less edible.  Time passed, there is no way of knowing how long.  Minutes can seem like hours to a child.  

There was another knock on the door.  “Can Christine come out?  We’re having a play in the Charlesworth’s garden and she’s in the play”. To my amazement, after a pause I was released. Off we all ran, down the path, across the road, up Heather’s path and round the back.  

All I can remember of the play is that it involved sitting in a house made by draping a cloth over a clothes horse. It cost one pin to get into the play, and we had a respectable size audience. 

Going out to play, whether in response to being called for or just going outside with no particular plan in mind, meant many and varied activities. For some reason that seemed mysterious to me, there was a season for certain kinds of play, for instance I had no idea why it was suddenly whip and top time or marble time. There was a time in the spring, when the air was fresh and cool winds blew, that I was “round the back”, making patterns on my top with coloured chalk and then wrapping the string of my whip in the groove of the top, setting the top spinning and whipping it to keep it going as I admired the rainbow of coloured circles, always better than the last, but the next try would be better. 

It was always a mystery to me that there were times when you played a game and times when you did not. Spinning tops was a seasonal game, but also skipping (American jump-rope),hop-scotch, ball games and street games. Mother bought us a diablo because she had one as a child, but it was only of passing interest since it wasn’t on the accepted list of activities. 

Talk about rhymes, equipment, singing games such as “Shake the bed” Monday Tuesday Wednesday, colours, relievio,kick the can

Of course, there were groups of children who generally played together. At times, everyone would be involved in a complicated make-believe of cooking and serving, for instance in Yvonne Hyatt’s garden. We went home for our dinner around noon and then play resumed for the afternoon. Since all the houses were built at about the same time, there were many young children, mostly two-somes as we were, some only children and the occsional larger family. Living through a depression, or slump as it was called in Yorkshire, did not make for large families except in the feckless. The Ball family at the end of Duncan Street down in Brinsworth was an example. Their children were called Margaret, Lily, Jacky, Billy, Marina, Mary, Brian, Michael, Kathleen, Anthony. 

Billy was my age but it was Jacky that I helped with his arithmetic when I had finished mine in Miss Firth’s class. I loved Miss Firth. More about her later. Avril Pointer was the one who was picked on. Her parents married after both were widowed. Avril was their only child together. I remember walking up Whitehill from Catcliffe behind Avril and joining the group in taunting her. She did wear some strange old-fashione clothes, including a red petticoat. Avril became angry and used the Brinsworth taunt, “Clean and paid for, washed and cared for, if you don’t like it what do you stare for?”  Unfortunately she then lifted her skirts and stuck her bottom out at us, showin g the clear scorch-mark print of a flat iron on her knickers. 

There was a repertoire of songs we used to sing with words made up for well known tunes. For example, to the tune of i-tiddly –i-ti pom pom we sang

I-tiddly-i-ti brown bread

I saw sausage drop dead

I saw polony riding on a pony

I-tiddly-i-ti brown bread.

Later, to the tune of Colonel Bogey we sang

Be kind to your web-footed friends

Remember the duck has a  mother

She lives all alone in a swamp

Where it’s always cold and damp

You may think that this is the end

Well it is.

Even later, I learned to the tune of Humoresque, from the time when train lavatories emptied straight onto the tracks. There were notices in the lavatories but not these words. 

Gentlemen will please refrain from

Passing water while the train

Is standing in the station if you pleas e

People standing underneath will

Get it in their eyes and teeth

So hold it ….. … …….

If you can  

The freedom to go out to play is something most children do not experience any more. An example of this is the use of bicycles or earlier than that, tricycles. My trike was a Triang, most certainly passed down from Sheila. I rode up and down the “causey “, meaning causeway (or sidewalk in US terms), and could go round the corner out of sight of the house. My first bicycle was a second-hand junior bike with a small metal flag as a decoration in the middle of the handle bars. This certainly widened my horizons since it brought other parts of the village and even other villages such as Catcliffe and Treeton within easy riding distance. As for the flag decoration, I was mortified and also afraid of the adult reaction when I turned a corner into the path across “The Middle” too fast and crashed, knocking the flag off on a fence post. To my surprise there were no recriminations. This was a feature of my childhood. At times I thought I was “in the clear” and found myself in trouble and at other times there was no comment on actions that I expected to be scolded for.  My next bicycle was a “sit up and beg” bike. It  had large wheels and one sat with a very upright  posture. Some illustrations of “Wizard of Oz” have the wicked witch riding on one. My bike was not new but was bought from an ad in the Rotherham Advertiser. The seller lived in Wickersley and Father and I went to look at it then he rode the bike home and I came home on the bus.  My  next bike was bought late on in the war. There were no bicycles for sale to civilians but a new scheme allowed steel workers to buy them through their employer. I played with a girl named Vera Hammerton whose father worked at Steel Peech and Tozers so he acquired one to be shared by Sheila and me. It was a three speed, all black and no chromium but we both thought it was wonderful and as far as I remember, we shared it very amicably. Sheila liked to have it on Fridays so that she could ride to school and stay late for the Sixth Form tennis club.  

Now, today, in 2003 I made the simnel cake, the traditional cake for Easter Sunday, and there are now only two weeks left in Lent.  The cake has to have time to mature before I put on it the top layer of almond paste to complement the layer embedded in the middle 

of the cake and cooked there. Delicious. These traditional foods for special days are very important to me and so in two weeks time, I will put on the almond paste, make a nest in the centre  and roughen the perimeter with a fork before browning the top under the grill. A break with tradition for my generation is to use Cadbury’s chocolate eggs with a pastel sugary outer coat in the nest instead of making almong paste eggs. Of course, the cake is finished by putting a cake frill around the sides.  

More about other traditional foods. The usual meals we had such as stew, broth, steamed puddings, pork butchery.

Saturday night was bath night on Whitehill. This was a fairly consistent custom,  although the exception was laid out in the statement, “I’m goin’ on me ‘olidays, I’m goin’ in the bath.” In order to have hot water, the fire was well stoked and the damper opened. Since the only object in the bathroom was the bath, it was a case of  “out of the bath and downstairs to get dried in front of the fire”. Sheila went first and then I followed in the same water. What always puzzled me was that although my body dried quickly, I had to sit in front of the fire to dry my hair. Father often helped the process along by towelling and brushing my hair. One of Mother’s hoary stories was about a boy who was asked by a teacher speaking in a plummy voice, “And what is a bath mat, Tommy?” When he replied that he didn’t know, she pursued the question by saying, “Well, what do you step onto when get out of the bath?” and he replied, “Mi durty shurt.” 

This morning I heard on the radio that the composer Haydn had a very unhappy marriage and that his wife used to cut up his music to make hair curlers. One of the three people present at this early morning broadcast from KDFC, the classical music station, expressed puzzlement at this piece of information. I don’t remember paper being used for curlers, but certainly strips of cloth or “rags” were used when I was growing up. There were two schools of thought about the procedure. If you wanted your child to have ringlets, as did the parents of my best friend Jean Wyld, after towelling the hair the strips of cloth were wrapped in a spiral with the hair. Mother did not approve of this method, the results of which I have to say looked nothing like naturally curly hair. She used to take a section of hair, put the rag across the bottom, and roll it up to the scalp. The cloth was then tied around the bunch of hair and off you went to bed for an uncomfortable night’s sleep. The results were inevitably short-lived. 

The Saturday  evening programmes were on the radio during this weekly ritual and the one I remember best was “In Town Tonight”, a series of interviews of visitors to London. What a London-oriented country England was in those days with its BBC announcers wearing evening dress to read the news and of course using received pronunciation.  These cozy evenings were part of a life of certainty that to a child seemed as if they would go on forever. We were aware that there was not much money but it accepted as the norm since there were few people in Brinsworth or Catcliffe who were better off.  This was during the “slump” and then later, the foreshadowing of another war,  but children were allowed their innocence then.

Our postman came twice each day and hand delivered all the letters and parcels. There must have been a way t o deliver large parcels, but it was only after the war that I remember the little red Post Office van that deivered parcels in the afternoon. At Christmas there were extra deliveries of course. In later years, University Students  took temporary jobs with the Post Office at Chrismas. I was never lucky enough to be hired, but Sheila was and Geoff had a Chrismas job at the GPO in Sheffield working nights. He talked about the government issued hot chocolate powder that they made up on their breaks. The telegram boy, always quite young, with a uniform and a pouch over his shoulder, rode a bicycle to deliver often unwelcome messages. He rode all the way from Rotherham, the nearest town, and since sending a telegram was expensive by village standards, they were only sent for extreme reasons. The vicar, the Rev. Davis, Doctor Sen  and a commercial traveller who lived on Whitehill Terrace were the only people with telephones. The post box was on the corner at the main road and it was emptied twice or three times each day. However, if you missed the last pick-up, you could wait for the “Post Bus”.  This was the last bus of the day, early in the evening, which had was a postal box just inside the door.  The buses were just like the kind used on “All Creatures Geat and Small”; small, noisy,  and quite primitive, with a sign saying “No Spitting’ at the front. 

Games we played on the roads. I draw a snake, rumpty tum tum, finger thumb or dumb, Kick can. Ally ally ally in the game’s broke up. Colors Fairy feet and Giant strides. What time is it Mr. Wolf

Be kind to your web footed friends, Gentlemen will please refrain…..

I tiddley i ti, brown bread, I saw sausage drop dead, I saw polony riding on a pony, 

I tiddley i ti, brown bread.

Yorkshire accent. Mester, poppo baby talk. 

Of course there was no observation of Thanksgiving, but we did have the annual Harvest Festival which was primarily a religious observance. It took place early in September when the corn was harvested and safely stored, and some sheaves of wheat or oats were always part of the decoration. The children brought fruit and vegetables from home and, supplemented by offerings from adults, they were used to decorate the altar, pillars, window sills and every other available surface. Wonderful feats of ingenuity were performed in swathing the pulpit and lectern in all kinds of flowers, greenery and produce. We sang “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” and “Come ye thankful people come” at the service and that was it. No special meals, no other activities. 

Scarlet fever. Antiphlogestene.Sheila’s accident, flamamene?

Mr. Walton’s cough.

Father’s schedule. Coming and going at strange times. The knocker up.

Old Place Names

There were many Norse place names around Rotherham but also others that reflected Roman names for example Rotherham, meaning “town on the River Rother”, Doncaster was Camp on the River Don. 

My aching knees last night reminded me of scarlet fever and the legacy it left me, then I thought about the time when Mother had scarlet fever about a year after I had it and the distress of that time that led finally to a series of memorable holidays at Beckfoot on the Solway Firth.  

I don’t remember the first signs of Mother’s illness, not surprising since I think I was four years old at the time, but I do remember being sent with Sheila to Mrs. Belcher’s house, two doors away, and being alone with Sheila in the front room, looking out of the window as Mother was taken away in an ambulance to Swallownest Isolation Hospital. I think it was a Sunday afternoon. The room was, like many front rooms in Brinsworth, a “parlour” with horse-hair furnishings and linoleum on the floor, seldom used, a little damp and fusty and an unusual place to be left alone with my sister. I was puzzled and anxious. The next day, back at home, a man from the Health Department came to our house, fumigated Mother’s bedroom and sealed up the door with paper tape. I was very frightened; not only had she been taken away, but it was as if something was terribly wrong and all traces of her had to be cleansed away. We were shooed away as we tried to watch this stranger with the small attache case seal off our parents’ bedroom.

Auntie Jean, Father’s younger sister and a favourite of mine, came to stay with us and although life was different, I was not unhappy. It was at this time that I got my little finger trapped in the hinge side of the front door and acquired my slightly bent little finger. One day, Auntie Jean went into the scullery and closed the door, a very unusual event, so when she told me to stay out, of course I pushed the door open and there she was getting washed and I saw her blue knickers or bloomers. That was the only time she was cross with me. After some time, Auntie Jean went home and Grandma, Mother’s mother came. This was just fine with me because she was a cozy person to be with and I had always loved her. She was the one who used to refer to having Nestles Swassles, condensed milk, on our bread and butter. However, I remember nothing of her time with us at Whitehill because after a few days it appears that she received a letter from Edgar and announced that she had to return to Carlisle. I don’t remember going up to Carlisle on the train with her but was told later that she took us to Father’s mother’s house and then went home. This led to my staying with Nana and Auntie Jean and Sheila stayed with Auntie Lizzie. 

I had a good time at Auntie Jean’s with cousin Eric to play with and very much admired Uncle Stan who came home from work and then went out in the evening. The fact that he went to the pub was not discussed.      

Auntie Jean, Grandma, Nana’s. return home. Wa sher. 

Apart from the non-alcoholic rum butter that we had at Nana’s and the delicious ginger pudding that Auntie Jean made

I need to move this last piece, it has nothing to do with holidays.Can’t find where to put it. It is a very long introduction to our stays at Beckfoot