In The Small Hours: Washday Blues
John Brian Leaver tells of the intense joy of childhood in chillier times.
For me, winter was always a problem time. Not summer, when I seemed to play all day long in woods of sweet chestnut where we lads built a treehouse, and there was haymaking at the farm where the banter and laughter of two peripatetic Irish hands could be heard across the meadow as far as our back gate. My flock bed slowly filled with hayseeds, and there was always a favoured conker in my sticky pocket.
One pre-war summer’s day a biplane landed in the hay meadow where we were turning the swathes. The pilot asked the way to a flying circus. In his declining years the farmer often recalled this landing, standing with an egg basket over his arm to point out the meadow where the ‘flying machine’ landed.
Winter smote me with its dearth of warmth. The fire in our living room range was the only one to fill a grate in my home, apart from the occasion when I had scarlet fever and, despite coal being rationed, a fire was lit in my bedroom.
Not that we saw much of that living room fire. For the first half of every week the well-polished range (Zebo applied Saturday mornings) disappeared behind a wall of washing draped on clothes-horses, which we knew as maidens. Sheets and shirts hung from a ceiling rack. A length of cord beneath the mantelpiece was festooned with socks.
The main benificiery of the fire's heat was our ginger tom cat who took up winter lodgings in the range’s oven.
Our one and only timepiece, bought before the war from Littlewood Stores with much-ado, struck a muffled quarter from atop the high mantelpiece. We could only guess which quarter, for the clock was hidden behind striped union shirts, their bibs, laps and sleeves steaming as they reached down to embrace a maiden.
Only after the mangle, boiler, dolly tub and posser had been put away for the week did we return to a kind of normality.
On winter evenings I was happier, and not much colder than if I had been indoors, when playing out with pals in snow, to the wind chime accompaniment of icicles on the tree branches. Then there was the joy of sledge-racing down steep Neddy’s Hill, numbed by the freezing air. On my homecoming, somewhere behind this wall of washing, there would be a jar of Snowfire to warm the pain of the chilblains within my clogs.
Keeping one's fingers from freezing so hard that they dropped off was solved by a "must have'' winter warmer - a Tate & Lyle syrup tin. A nail was used to knock holes into its lid and base. The tin was then tightly packed with cotton waste soaked in kerosene. The lid was firmly replaced and the waste was set alight. To encourage an even burn one ran with the tin held horizontally, with smoke pouring out of the base holes. Hey presto! When Tate & Lyle’s sleeping lion started to bubble, you had a personal winter warmer.
This was fine until one needed a free hand to pull a sledge. I solved the problem by placing the tin in a jacket pocket, the lining of which was impregnated with raspberry jam which had oozed from butties stored there while I was playing out.
The smell of warm jam on the night air as my pocket lining smouldered resulted in me being called Chivers.
Now I see my grandchildren huddling over computer games in the warmth of their bedrooms. And I think of colder days. But that was a time when I was richer than Croesus, hearing the skylarks and the "green ripples singing down the corn''.
