Open Writing

Coming into the kitchen after hanging out the clothes, and while Mum was talking, I used to pick out the dirt from grooves on the side of Maskell's stoneware sink. Outside in the wash-house Mum boiled the whites in a big brick copper with a fire lit underneath, using firewood chopped on the back step. She stirred the boiling clothes with a wooden copper stick, while clouds of steam whirled overhead mixed with the smell of Hudson’s Soap Powder and Sunlight soap.

Mum wore a sleeveless crossover pinafore in a floral print, and a coarse apron over the front to stop getting too wet as she rubbed and scrubbed the shirts and hankies at the wash tub.

Sometimes I was allowed to make the blueing water, squeezing and swirling a Reckitts blue bag in a large enamel bowl of cold water where the whites were rinsed.

After that they went through the wooden rollers of a big iron mangle.

Once Mum told me that when Maskell's cat had kittens she had to drown them in the big copper. Listening to her story I couldn’t take it in. Unbelievable - I didn't ever remember seeing a cat there.

We lived on the corner of Canterbury Terrace in a big upstairs front room and a back bedroom.

There was patterned lino on the stairs which Mum had to keep washed over.

On the cramped dark landing, lit by a small oil lamp, was a black iron gas stove. We kept our food in a wooden safe with sides of perforated zinc. It was as well that we shopped every day.

The day we moved from there it was raining, and I wore a mackintosh cape with a gathered hood, and was told I looked like Little Red Riding Hood, only my hood was blue.

I had to say goodbye and kiss Maskell, who had a moustache. She was wearing her usual plain blue coat-overall and matching mob-cap.

Lifted into the back of the lorry, Mum and I sat on kitchen chairs, guarding the bowl of goldfish.

As we moved away I looked out over the tailboard and felt we must be going to a better place.

But there were accidents. One day in our upstairs flat at Crouch Hill, I tipped my goldfish down the lavatory, while trying to clean him out. Two or three times there I fell down the stairs. And playing 'coalman', using my best china doll to imitate a sack of coals slung over my shoulder, I let go and her head was smashed.

We moved back to Islington, taking the upstairs rooms in my Great-Aunt Annie's house, which was just round the corner from Maskell's. Aunt Annie was a spinster, who looked after her mother, my Great-Grand-mother Pearson.

I would watch Aunt Annie brushing her mother's long yellowy-white hair in the mornings, putting it up in a big tortoiseshell comb. The old lady wore a black blouse with a high collar. Over the voluminous black skirt reaching down to her ankles was tied a large white starched apron.

Great Grandma called me Little Two Shoes.

Whenever I was sent in to see her, Mum would give me strict instructions never to eat anything she gave me. From the depths of her apron pocket, where she also kept her handkerchief, Great Grandma would give me acid tablets or brandy balls.

Sometimes she reached for the tin on the chiffonier to give me a Pat-a-cake biscuit. These gifts were always taken back to Mum, who threw them away. I never questioned this. She would give me a ginger biscuit instead.

Great Aunt Annie took in washing, and clothes were hung out to dry next to the chicken-run in the very small back yard.

Once, I asked about a white garment blowing on the line above my head, like a pair of short calico trouser legs with embroidered edges. I was told they were Great-Grandma's drawers. There was no middle part at all, no gusset, and a tape-drawstring through the waistband. They didn't look like knickers, but I worked it out much later that they might have been handy when negotiating the long, bulky black skirt worn by the old lady, if she wanted to 'go'.

Mum used an upright wringer in the yard outside. I liked watching the water squeezing from the clothes as they went through the wooden rollers. But in the downstairs back room Aunt Annie had a huge box-mangle, which rumbled back and forth as she turned the big iron handle. Damp clothes were laid in the box beneath, carefully smoothed around blanket-covered rollers.

Later on when Great Grandma died, I was taken into the bedroom to see her in her coffin, but was more interested in the two glass domes of stuffed birds on the bedroom side cupboards, and the big pincushion full of hat pins.

When Great Aunt Annie got rid of the box mangle from the room downstairs, we took over and made it into our kitchen. Next to the wash-house was an outside lavatory with a wall-to-wall seat of scrubbed white wood. The door had a latch and a big iron bolt. Mum whitened the edge of the step up into the lavatory. She also whitened the front doorstep and the kitchen hearth, after black-leading the fire-grate with Zebra polish.

The whitening, - a lump of white hearthstone wrapped in newspaper, was bought regularly from the oilshop on the corner of our road. From there we also had the best malt vinegar. It came from a small wooden barrel stood on a worn wooden step just inside the shop door.

Mr.Parslow held a funnel in the top of our bottle and turned the barrel's tap on.

His shop was a cavern of strange objects kept on the counter, or in small drawers on the walls behind him, on the floor or hanging in festoons from the ceiling. Bundles of firewood were stacked against the counter and large red cans of paraffin on the sawdust-covered floor. Small wonder his shop was always so cold. A stove would have been a fire hazard.

From Aunt Annie’s house I later went to school, but that's another story.