Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (3 page)

Relatively few soldiers died of gas
poisoning. Most, like my father, were condemned to a slow death after they returned
home. Poor Father. No wonder he suffered and seemed withdrawn. They called him, and
thousands like him, the ‘Lost Generation’ as they never really
recovered from their experiences.

Millions of boys died for their country
during that dreadful war. Those poor young men – if they had known
at
the start what they would be facing, would they ever have signed up?

Father never spoke about his role in the
war. He was typical of the men of his era and kept his feelings locked away deep inside.
His body betrayed him, though. The terrifying coughing fits that turned my
mother’s face as white as flour were a dreadful legacy of his battle. Every
now and again I’d wander into the kitchen to see him coughing so much that his
face would turn purple. I’d stay rooted to the spot as he gasped for breath,
his whole body shuddering with every gasp.

‘I feel a bit queer,’
he’d rasp and, with that, his body would convulse into more spasms of
coughing.

Mother would rush past me with rags and a
bowl of hot water. Slowly the white rags would turn crimson red as Father gasped and
coughed up blood.

‘Sit yerself forrards, my
love,’ she’d smile, gently rubbing his back.
‘You’ll be right in no time.’ But I could tell by the way
her bottom lip wobbled when she spoke that she didn’t really believe it.

After each attack he’d disappear
for a few days, off to a sanatorium in Hastings, where it was believed the fresh sea air
would revive him back to health. His spells in the sanatorium never worked, though, and
he’d return as fragile as he left.

From 1930 onwards the government issued
wooden huts for all ex-servicemen with failing health to sleep in. It was believed that
sleeping out in the fresh air, away from coal fires, would be better for their lungs.
Once you’ve been gassed, though, I don’t expect there’s
much would help.

Still, my father had his issued and it was duly
set up in the back garden. The hut was on an iron swivel axis so it could be turned
round to face away from the freezing Norfolk wind that whipped in off the fens or
positioned to face the sun, depending on the weather. Sounds crazy, doesn’t
it, him sleeping in a hut in the garden when he was so fragile, but that was the
thinking of the day.

‘You need the fresh air,
it’ll do ya lungs good,’ Mother would say, hustling him out to the
garden.

He weren’t the only one. Loads of
men, poorly from the war, slept outside in huts to get their daily constitutional blast
of country air.

But despite this, and his failing health, my
father was an optimistic man who never dwelt on his misfortune. ‘I’m
the lucky one awight,’ he used to say. ‘Least I can still provide
for my family.’

And in many ways he was lucky. He had
survived – unlike the countless other young men who’d had their brains
spattered out and were left to rot in the thick mud around the trenches of France. Back
here in the UK the countryside around Downham Market was littered with the
‘Lost Generation’. Them as fought and were left able came home and
tried to pick up their lives, but if you weren’t able to work through illness,
what was your destiny? There was no army pension or support. If you were lucky enough to
survive you were out on your own.

Injured officers were well cared for, but
for non-commissioned soldiers it was more hit and miss. Many developed alcohol problems
and mental illness and were left destitute, forced to sleep in barns or ditches and beg
for food. Shell shock is now a recognized condition, but
there was less
sympathy for those with mental scars back then, they were just seen as sissies. It was
an absolute scandal, it was.

Often they would come knocking on our door
for handouts.

‘Hot water, Miss, if you
please,’ they’d croak.

Mother, like most of the villagers, always
took pity on them and would fill their cans with hot water or tea and give them what
little bread we could spare.

‘They made a sacrifice for their
country,’ she would say. ‘It’s our duty to
help.’

They were known as
‘tramps’ locally. Many would go off and do the rounds for months at
a time, trudging from village to village for lodgings and food. They all wore the same
haunted expression and often had missing hands or feet. Amputated limbs poked out from
underneath the rags they wore. Others had faces that were a patchwork of scars. At
times, when we walked into Downham Market, we’d see them selling matchsticks
by the side of the road. They stared at me with black, soulless eyes and I wondered what
hell those eyes had witnessed.

‘Don’t be giving them no
sauce, Mollie,’ Mother would hiss in my ear, gripping my hand that bit
tighter.

She didn’t say it but we all
thought it. It could so easily have been my father.

In the winter, when it was too cold to sleep
in the freezing ditches, many spent the night in the workhouse in Downham Market, where
they chopped wood to earn their keep. The 250-bed workhouse was a dark place and we grew
up in the shadow of this institution. I didn’t know much about what went on
inside but I knew on pain
of death you didn’t want to end up
there. The fear of the workhouse and such poverty was only a heartbeat away for
many.

So I suppose, compared to them, Father
was
blessed. He eked out a living from our smallholding, which he rented
off the local squire for ten shillings a week. No one, apart from the gentry, owned
their own homes then. We kept chickens and a pig and grew fruit and vegetables on the
few acres of land we had and we sold what produce we could to make a few shillings.

Father’s two older brothers were
postmen and when he was well enough he even helped them out on their deliveries in
exchange for a little money. And I knew Granny Esther helped us with handouts of cash.
She was reasonably well off, what with her shop, and she had a real business head on
her. She’d never see us short. Family was everything in them days and as long
as ours had breath in their bodies they’d not see us destitute. The house was
always full of aunts and uncles, dropping off a gift of a bit of dripping in exchange
for some eggs. That’s the way it was in those days. You looked after your
own.

The only black sheep of the family was my
granny’s brother, Horace. He’d been in the army, then had a broken
love affair and lost his way. I never knew too much about Horace as he was never really
spoken of, but I sensed it was always a big embarrassment that we had a tramp in the
family. I’d hear dark mutterings from Mother that Uncle Horace was
‘on the road again’.

Thankfully, fate had different ideas for us
than it did for poor old Uncle Horace and we didn’t really want for anything.
Mother made all our clothes and we grew our own
fruit and vegetables to
eat or sell. Father’s double-barrel shotgun stood by the fire in the kitchen
and every now and again he’d go out and get us a rabbit or pigeon for tea. If
we were really lucky we’d have pheasant. Everyone knew you could be prosecuted
if you killed and ate the local squire’s pheasants, but if one happened to
stray on to our land, well then, it was fair game, wasn’t it? All the same,
Father would pluck it outside by a fire in an old outhouse so any stray feathers would
be burnt to cinders, leaving no trace of his harmless crime.

‘Don’t you be talking of
this to no one, Mollie,’ he’d order if he caught me watching him
plucking fast and steadily in the dark.

And if I ever dared touch that gun,
I’d get a savage cut across the backside faster than you can say
‘’ands orf’.

Father must have been well enough on
occasion though, as when I turned six my younger brother, James William Browne, made an
appearance. It was a dark, stormy night just before fireworks night, and the birth was
no less explosive.

I remember lying huddled in the dark in my
bedroom, hearing Mother’s wretched screams ring round the cottage. Her cries
were at times pitiful, pleading, then at other times so ferocious in their intensity
they were almost feral.

‘What’s
happening?’ I cried, alarmed, to my father.

‘Go to sleep, child,’ he
ordered.

I covered my ears with the sheets, but still
I could hear her bloodcurdling cries. My father slept in with me, well out of the way,
as the local doctor thumped up and down the stairs, helped by the neighbours. In 1922
there was no such thing as hospital care and the NHS was twenty-six
years away from its conception. Women always gave birth at home with the help of a
doctor or midwife if they were lucky, and what friends and neighbours were around. The
Midwives Act had only become law twenty years prior to that, in 1902, after a group of
visionary women fought to have midwifery recognized as a profession. Before that,
anyone, and I mean anyone, could deliver a baby. Most of the time it was whoever
happened to be around and, in some drastic cases, prostitutes paid in gin could act as
midwives. Fortunately the Act became law, the Royal College of Midwives was born and
birthing standards improved.

The next morning I crept into the bedroom
where Mother would have the customary two-week lying-in period. It was then that I saw
the reason for her blood-curdling screams. She lay back against the pillow, her face
ashen with exhaustion. In her arms lay a healthy little baby boy, but her legs were tied
roughly together with rope!

Poor Mother had had a breech birth. James
had come out feet first. In those days, breech births were complicated, painful and –
without modern medicine – a major cause of death in mother and baby. They were
incredibly lucky to have survived, but so torn and damaged was she internally, the
doctor had bound her legs together to stop her moving and encourage her body to
heal.

A rope! Can you ever imagine such a thing
today?

‘Meet your baby
brother,’ she said, smiling weakly.

But my mother was nothing if not tough and
within two weeks she insisted the rope was untied and she was back scrubbing the
kitchen, blackleading the stove,
baking, washing and completing the
countless other tasks that consumed her life.

As James grew up I longed to have a little
boisterous playmate to get into scrapes with, but it soon became obvious that he was a
quiet child who preferred to sit by my mother’s side.
‘You’re the boy and he’s the girl all right,’
Mother used to cackle as we grew older and the differences in our personalities became
obvious.

She was right. Tide nor time could pin me
down as I roamed the land looking for adventures and trying to avoid the clutches of PC
Risebrough.

The countryside was beyond beautiful. The
hedgerows, trees and dykes were alive with kingfishers, yellowhammers and blue tits and
on a summer day you could catch the tantalizing whiff of salt in the air off the Wash.
I’m sure that today there just aren’t the same number of birds
about. Back then the skies were black with birds and the noise of ’em all
going off during the dawn chorus could deafen you. I loved it though, it made me feel
glad just to be alive.

In the summer months the grass verges were
filled with rows of old brightly painted caravans belonging to the Romany gypsies who
came to hawk their wares in town. I’d gaze, intrigued, at the older ladies,
with their waist-length silver hair and faces as wrinkled as walnut shells. They
wandered door to door selling hazel-wood clothes pegs. I’d sit on my bike and
spy on them through the bushes. Gypsy folk fascinated me. Where had they come from and
where would they go to next? They washed up like tides on the River Great Ouse and the
next morning they’d be gone on the winds.

Father never liked them and always locked up
his chickens when they were in the area, but I had no problem with them. They belonged
in the countryside as much as any of us.

In and amongst all this rural splendour, me
and my friends, Jack and Bernard, ran wild. While my mother busied herself with the
endless washing, cooking, baking and cleaning that keeping house involved in the days
before modern appliances, I had incredible freedom. Every day was filled with magic,
promise and excitement. Because our time wasn’t taken up with computers and
televisions, we learnt to use our imagination. The Norfolk fields were one giant
adventure playground. If there was a tree to climb or a ditch to poke around in, you
could bet I’d be in the thick of it, spattered with mud, my face stained
purple from gorging on blackberries and my pockets stuffed with nuts, birds’
eggs and feathers. And if the ever-present PC Risebrough happened to catch us, well,
that just added to the adventure.

We played rounders, hopscotch and skipping
races in the summer. Come winter, when temperatures plunged and the Norfolk ponds froze
over, we tied blades to our boots with string and skated over the ice. It was ever so
deep and dangerous but what did we care? Often we’d land, helpless with
laughter, in an icy scrummage of arms and legs. Only the promise of bread and dripping
by the fire would have us limping for home with aching limbs and grazed knees. Actually,
in my whole childhood, I don’t ever remember a time when my knees
weren’t grazed!

The only two rules my mother would ever
issue before I ran to the door of a morning? ‘Don’t cheek the
tramps,
Mollie Browne, that mouth of yours’ll get you in
trouble one of these days,’ and ‘Stay away from the sluice. People
have drowned swimming there.’

‘Yes, Mum,’
I’d promise.

Denver Sluice, one mile out of Downham on
the River Great Ouse, was built to drain the vast wetlands of the fens and create
fertile farmland. But to us kids it was like a magnet and the perfect place to take a
cooling dip on a hot summer’s day. Mother’s words would be lost on
the wind as I pedalled like crazy to the sluice with my dress tucked into my
knickers.