As Time Goes By: A Long Wait For A Wedding
...In the little house in Islington the three sisters shared a bed and sometimes for a treat on Sunday mornings their father Bert would bring them glasses of cream soda.
At table they were always being scolded for their incessant giggling...
Eileen Perrin tells of her mother's younger days.
Eileen’s mother, Kathleen May Harris was born in Islington in 1892 and lived to be 96. As the middle one of three sisters she always kept in close touch with Alice the youngest, and Florrie her eldest sister.
Their father was a painter and decorator and their mother took in washing.
Sometimes at school after ‘Norah the nit nurse’ had been, the three sisters were called out in front of the class to show off their long blonde hair.
‘Look how clean it is ‘the teacher would say. ‘Mum washes it in her copper water, Miss’ was their reply.
In the little house in Islington the three sisters shared a bed and sometimes for a treat on Sunday mornings their father Bert would bring them glasses of cream soda.
At table they were always being scolded for their incessant giggling.
Albert Harris, Eileen’s grandfather died of throat cancer before she was born.
Kitty, as she was called, found a job as a machinist in a costumiers in City Road, where she ‘ran up’ skirts for Selfridges and other West End shops. The girls in the workroom also made banners and aprons for the Masons Guilds.
Kit was friendly with a girl called Polly Coan, who asked her one day if she would like to meet her younger brother Fred.
He sent to tell her that at their rendezvous she would recognise him, as he would have a book under his arm and be wearing a flower in his buttonhole.
He used to tell us about it, remembering that Kit walking at his side was wearing such a large hat he couldn’t see her face. From then, he became her ‘young man’.
He was a book buyer for a booksellers called (as far as I can recall), C. Williams, somewhere near Farringdon Road. Walking around London, calling at all the publishers, he got to know the area well, and was always delighted to be asked the way.
When Fred joined up in 1915 Kitty went down to Salisbury Plain to see him where he was in camp, taking the train from Paddington. She stayed on the Herrington’s farm for a few days.
He was sent to France and Kitty waited for him. Having been taken prisoner-of-war he was released from a German camp in Belgium and came home in 1918.
They married in 1919, renting rooms round the corner from her mother, Martha Harris Their first baby Kathleen died in 1920 after a difficult breech birth.
Their next daughter was born - another breech birth – just before Christmas 1922 and they named her Eileen after the Wiltshire farmer’s daughter Eileen Herrington.
