it comes to playing the piano some people can carry a tune but appear to stagger under the load. Not so Dad. Those strong, gnarled hands that hewed coal for eight hours on a daily basis would suddenly be transformed into deftly gliding fingers that lovingly caressed the piano keys. So popular was he as a pianist that Dad often gave recitals at civic halls and theatres throughout South Yorkshire and, in the summer, entertained holidaymakers at Butlin’s holiday camps. I would listen to him play and be totally transfixed. He not only reproduced the piece perfectly but he seemed to capture its very essence and that of its composer.
Given his talent, I have often wondered whether if he had been born into a middle-class family in, say, the leafy suburbs of Betjeman’s London rather than a working-class family in the South Yorkshire coalfields, his musical destiny would have been different. Dad was born at the turn of the twentieth century, when working people accepted their lot. There was little, if any, recognition of a working person’s musical talent by the great and good of classical music. Dad would never have had the wherewithal nor was he offered the opportunity to develop his talent at a musical college or academy. A great pity, not least because a bill poster proclaiming, ‘The Conservatoire Collier plays Chopin’, would have had a wonderful alliterative ring to it.
Dad began working down the pit at the age of fourteen and continued to do so until he retired at the age of sixty-five. He hadn’t missed a day’s work and, what’s more, in fifty-one years as a miner Dad was never once late. On his retirement, the well-meaning folk at the colliery bought him a clock.
My mum was called Ivy. She was a very loving and attentive mother who, in keeping with most mothers of that era, worked impossibly long hours cooking, washing, ironing, cleaning, mending and shopping for her family. Long before the phrase was invented, women were ‘multi-taskers’, quite simply because their role of looking after the home and children and everything to do with domesticity was labour intensive.
I was fortunate in having a mother and father who took an interest in me, my brothers and sister. I felt Dad knew me and what made me tick. Most of the other dads I knew were also miners but they spent little time with their kids. In the 1940s, as now, a mother knew everything about her children – the scabs, nits, bad teeth, best friends, favourite foods, constipation, shoes that didn’t fit properly, romances, secret fears, hopes and dreams – but most fathers were only vaguely aware of the small people living in the house. Not so my dad.
Home was a two-up-two-down red-brick terraced house on Station Road in Laughton Common. People stayed in their jobs in those days and they stayed in their houses too. It was unheard of for couples to set up home before they were married. Once they had, the vast majority stayed put until the time came for their children to call the funeral director. There were no nursing homes, no managed flats for the elderly. A house was bought or rented and turned into a home by women like my mum. At various times it was also a nursery (though no one ever used the term ‘nursery’ in the 1940s), a hospital, classroom, party function room, music hall stage, a rest home and, in the vast majority of cases, in the end, a chapel of rest for those who had purchased the house in the first place.
Internally and externally, the houses took on the character of their occupants. From either end of Station Road the terraced houses all looked the same, but as a boy I soon learned the subtle individualities of each one. It was the small touches – invariably the mother’s – that gave them their identity. The highly polished brass letterbox on the front door of the Coopers’; the pristine gold-leaf house number on the fanlight over the front door of the Cartwrights’ (as a boy I had no idea why this number had survived intact when all the others had become mottled and flaked with age); the net curtains in the front window of the Thompsons’, gathered rather than hanging straight as in every other home; the red glass vase, no more than four inches high, that balanced precariously on the narrow window ledge in the Smiths’ front window.
Those surnames were all traditional, straightforward, dependable, no-nonsense names, most of which owed their origin to some trade or other. When I was a boy it was said Sheffield boasted more Smiths than anywhere else in England, until, as Dad once joked, the title was taken one weekend by a cheap hotel in Brighton.
Fresh flowers were a rarity in the houses. In the summer, Mum would occasionally give me a threepenny bit (just over 1p) and send me across to the allotments which were, in the main, rented by miners. I would ask the allotment owner, ‘Have you any chrysanths you don’t want?’ Chrysanths – that was all the miners who ran the allotments seemed to grow in the way of flowers. With their football-like blooms (there was even a species called ‘Football Mums’) and tall stems, these flowers dominated the small living rooms of the houses they fleetingly graced.
Keen to make threepence and offload my surplus flowers, I would find myself skipping home with an enormous bunch of earwig-infested chrysanths. Mum would indeed marvel at them before cutting their stems and displaying them in two or often three vases around the house. I only realised their full name, chrysanthemums, when I was in my mid-teens. True, chrysanths runs off the tongue a lot easier but, looking back, there might have been another reason for the shortened name. Chrysanthemum sounds Latin, something only posh kids learned. In Sheffield and Rotherham in the forties such class distinction was as clearly drawn by the working class as it was by the middle and upper classes, and you wouldn’t want to be accused of getting above your station.
Mum organised the house and family life and we functioned to a tried-and-tested routine. We had no bathroom; we washed twice daily at the kitchen sink, usually with cold water. In keeping with every family I knew, Friday night was bath night. Dad would take down the tin bath from its hook in the backyard shed. It would be placed on newspaper in front of the living-room fire and laboriously filled by Dad with kettles of hot water. First to go was Dad, then my sister, followed by my two brothers, then me. Being the fifth user of the same bath water it’s a wonder I didn’t get out dirtier than when I got in.
It seems unbelievable now, but Friday night was the only time in the week when I changed my underpants and vest. Again, we were not unique in this, every family I knew changed underwear weekly. There were no modern labour-saving devices such as washing machines. Mum washed our clothes every Monday, in the kitchen, with a tub and dolly, after which she would hand-rinse everything then put all the washing through a hand-operated wringer before hanging it out to dry, or, in the event of rain, on wooden clothes horses which were dotted around the living room or placed in front of the ‘range’ fire. Come Tuesday they were dry. On Wednesday they were ironed and then put away in wooden drawers that smelled of lavender and mothballs, ready for us to wear again on Friday after our bath, and so the cycle was repeated. Mum’s life must have been as monotonous as mutton, as regular as the roll of an army drum. That my childhood was such a happy one, secure and filled with a warm heart is to her eternal credit.
Saturday was football day, but for the vast majority of Laughton Common women and, I would suggest, women everywhere, it was the day they had their hair done. It was the time of ‘Twink’ perms for women and an entirely different type of perm for the menfolk.
Come the weekend, the women of Laughton Common would buy a Twink perm in their quest to have glamorous hair, if only for a couple of days. I recall my mother and neighbouring women spending most of Saturday with myriad purple plastic grips in their hair which to me looked like small chicken bones. Around these purple ‘bones’ they wrapped strands of hair and tissue paper. I never knew the reason for the tissue paper and still don’t; it was minutiae from a mysterious female world that, for all it touched mine, was to remain beyond my ken.
The permed hair would be protected from the elements and sooty Sheffield air with a headscarf. Just about every woman in Laughton Common sported a headscarf on a Saturday, though the effect alluded more to ‘Old Mother Riley’ than Grace Kelly in an open-top sports car.
On a Saturday it was not only the women who talked of perms but the menfolk too, though the perms the men discussed were far removed from the Twink variety.
