Open Writing

My husband’s Auntie Mary was typical of many Bolton ladies born at the turn of the century. She was one of a family of six, five girls and one boy, George, who went cheerfully to France with the Lancashire Fusiliers never to return.

Only one of the five sisters married when the war ended. She eventually married the best friend of the soldier brother who, incidentally, was with him in France at the time he was shot. The other four, like many young ladies after the war, discovered there weren’t enough men to go round.

One sister left home to become a house mother in a children’s home; one died in her early teens of polio, and another married a widower later in life.

Their mother died from the Spanish flu which swept the country in 1918, so Auntie Mary was left to look after her father until he died, which couldn’t have been easy for her, thus leaving her in the family home.

When I first went to the house, there was a large old-fashioned kitchen range in the main room, comprising coal fire and oven. This used to be polished regularly with something called Zebbo. There were brass candlesticks on the over mantle, as it was called, and a moveable hob for the kettle.

A toasting fork was used for the thick toast made from bread out of the fire oven, bread which had lovely crispy crusts. The oven also produced juicy stews and creamy rice pudding with a delicious brown skin.

There was no electricity in the house. Artificial light came from a gas mantle over a large square table in the centre of the room. This was covered with a heavy velour tablecloth with tassels round the edge, which was replaced by a spotless white cloth at lunchtime and a self-embroidered one at teatime.

Electricity eventually arrived. The range was replaced with a more modern gas fire and a gas stove was acquired, but everything else remained the same. A large highly polished chiffonier took up the whole of one wall, with bronze classical type statues at either end. There was a long settle, a treadle sewing machine, a fireside rocking chair and rag rugs. There was a parlour which was only entered on very special occasions, and the doorsteps were always well scrubbed and edged with donkey stone.

Auntie Mary had been one of the many children who worked half time in the mill. She worked from early morn until lunchtime then went off the school, where she often fell asleep with her head on the desk. Nevertheless, she finished school with legible handwriting, good spelling and a fair knowledge of history and geography. And I have never seen anyone add up a Co-op dividend sheet of little yellow strips so quickly!

She went straight into the mill on leaving school and trained to be a weaver, finally running several looms at the same time. She learned to lip read because of the excessive noise which pervaded the weaving shed. It was probably this bombardment of her eardrums that was partially responsible for her deafness in later life.

In her spare time Auntie Mary constantly knitted garments - cardigans and jumpers with the most intricate patterns, and during the Second World War countless socks and Balaclava helmets. She also did crochet work and tatting.

Every surface in the house which was suitable was adorned with a mat of some description. She embroidered and did what was then called poker work, a method of burning texts and flowers into wood.

She was a staunch pillar of the Church and passed her skills on to the members of the Girls’ Friendly Society, known as the GFS, which was one of the Church groups. Their work was then handed on the for annual sale of work, held to raise money for Church funds. She sang in the choir and was eventually made an honorary member of the Mothers’ Union.

Auntie Mary would take a week’s holiday every year either to Morecambe or Llandudno, preferring Morecambe because of the privilege of watching the sunsets across the bay and enjoying coach trips to the Lake District.

As she got older the arthritis she had been plagued with for so long worsened, though she still kept her fingers loose with her knitting and crochet work. But she needed to have hip replacements, one at 70, the other at 75. This was a time when a hip replacement wasn’t a routine operation and was much more of an ordeal than it is today. But she still remained on her own, independent and undaunted.

One day two youths came to her front door pretending to be asking directions. Auntie Mary was suspicious and closed the door, then went to the back door and found the other one trying to break in. She chased him up the yard with the sweeping brush!

We persuaded her to have a telephone. If it rang and she couldn’t quite get to it in time, she would sit down and ring all the personal numbers she had and say, ‘Was that you?’ Any time she thought about something she wished us to bring or something she wished us to do next time we visited, she would be on the phone.

Television came into Auntie Mary’s life, and she loved it. She watched anything and everything but had the sound turned up so loudly you could hear it outside, especially when she joined in with Songs of Praise.

When Auntie Mary came to visit us, we would go for her in the car and she would be sitting waiting - handbag and gloves on her knee, brightly polished shoes on her feet and a hat on which never came off until she returned home.

We would take her the scenic route over Scout Road, where we would pause whilst she looked over the town and reminisced about smoking chimneys and the pall they cast and how it would clear during the Bolton holidays in days gone by. Always as we passed Dunscar War Memorial, she would nod her head at the young soldier and say, ‘That’s our George.’

Auntie Mary had a habit of catching up with conversations we had finished some minutes past and of saying, ‘Oh! I like watching the news.’ and then either talk all the way through it or fall asleep. A little forbearance was often required.

When Auntie Mary died she left a gap in our lives. She had the Lancashire sense of humour and a fund of stories. She was kind but outspoken, sometimes to the point of rudeness. She was brought up in a hard school, but managed to get and give pleasure in a life with few of the advantages expected of life today.