YESTERDAYS CHILD. Chapter 5

[Maywalk]

Chapter 5

SETTLING IN

When we were finally sorted out at the Y.W.C.A, we were sent with an official who was going round knocking on folk's doors to see if they could accommodate us. These people must have had their names and addresses put forward at some time or another to say they would take in evacuees. I was a young child of nearly 11 years by then and even I felt degraded having to do this.
My mother must have felt worse because she had never asked anything of anyone.
We were told that everything was organised but I would have said that it was organised chaos.
My mother and myself finally got taken in by a lovely couple from Liverpool and my brother was taken in very reluctantly by a person round the corner.

When we walked in to Dolly and Peter Pendegast's house in King George Road it was warm and cosy and Mrs Pendegast said that she would run a bath for us.
I thought that I was in heaven as I walked into the bathroom because it was all white tiles and a lovely big bath to sit and wallow in. I was overawed with it.
Such a contrast to our old tin bath that used to hang on a rusty six inch nail that was hammered in to the scullery wall. Before the war started.
This was brought in every Friday night for a bath in front of the fire.
God help you if you were the last one to get in the bath, you finished up muckier getting out than when you first stepped in.
The Pendegasts bathroom was the height of luxury to me.
I forgot how hungry I was while day dreaming in that bath.

My mother and I settled in with Mr and Mrs Pendegast and my mother handed over her ration books so that the combined rations would go a bit further.

On the first Saturday that we were there the butcher walked in handing over the meat and saying to my mother " Aay oop meduck,.ayer mashed?"
Oh dear! that was like a red rag to a bull.
My mother promptly threw the meat back at him which smacked him in the eye, saying "You cheeky git! I have never been with another man in my life. How dare you?"
Mrs Pendegast heard the commotion and came running in to find what the ruckus was all about. The poor butcher said " I only asked if she had mashed"
My mother was all worked up ready to clobber him when Mrs Pendegast explained that he was only asking if a cup of tea was made.
My mother told him that he should talk "bleeding English" because a masher where she came from was someone who fornicated with someone's spouse.

A typical case of the English language gone mad.

The butcher and my mother became good friends after that incident. Peter Pendegast became a high up official for the Hosiery Union. If I am correct I think that he lost a leg at Dunkirk.

I was still wearing the dreaded eye patch and my mother asked Mrs Pendegast if she knew of an optician because I had not had an eye check up since before the bombing started. Mrs Pendegast suggested going to Ingrams in the Market Place.
I was by this time coming up to puberty and beginning to feel self conscious about my eye being covered up.
I was dreading going to the optician because I was so afraid that I would still have to carry on wearing the blooming patch.
I was sitting on pins as he took the patch off my good eye and gave me a series of tests to find out if everything was in focus.
He then said that I should dispose of the eye patch and start using my good eye to make it stronger after having it covered up for so long. I could have hugged him to death for granting my one and only wish. From then on he was my knight in shining armour.
I went to him for all my eye checks after that and he very often used to stop and have a word with me when I met him out when shopping. Later in life he became a J.P. I never looked back after that and got through my teens without spectacles most of the time and Thank God no eye-patch.

We had to leave the Pendegasts after about five weeks because the German bombers had moved further afield and started to bomb Liverpool and their own family needed sanctuary. We left to go to another billet which was about two miles from the school that I had to go to.
John my brother came with us but I always felt uneasy when the man of the house was about. I mentioned this to John and I can still hear him saying " If he touches you I'll bash his brains in". That statement, albeit crude, made me feel safer.
John must have told my mother because she came back to the billet one day with a key for a little cottage in Stone Yard that was a part of Churchgate.

We were thrilled to bits to know that we would have our own front door. My mother was getting known round Loughborough because she liked a glass of ale and always finished up in the Nelson. She had a great singing voice and, before she fell pregnant with my eldest brother, was on the music halls.
Anyway she got known for her voice and was asked by many of the local business people to give her rendering of their favourite songs. She often used to be pie-eyed when she got home with all the ale they bought her. I think that this is how she got the key for the cottage.

The cottage had dark green walls and was quite tiny but we were not worried it was ours as long as the rent was paid. My mother went to Armstrong's the auctioneers and bought a second hand table that used to spin round on the top. If you wanted salt to put on your meagre dinner you very often finished up with someone else's meal.
She also paid a few shillings for a double bed that had a mesh spring but no mattress. All three of us used to lie on that bed with coats over us. We did not mind because we were all together and it was better than an air-raid shelter. My mother also bought a couple of chairs and a few orange boxes to put our bits in which were then covered with a faded curtain to make it look more homely. It has to be remembered that new furniture was unobtainable unless you were getting married, even then you had to have dockets for it.
Two sugar sacks were dyed yellow for curtains which were put up with two large nails each side of the window with string threaded through a hem that my mother had stitched on them.
I must point out here that sugar in those days was delivered in large sack bags that held a hundredweight. It was then scooped into small blue paper bags for each customer.
There was also a pegged rug on the stone floor.
Whoopee we had a home??????

I almost forgot to mention that before we moved in to that cottage my mother fumigated it. She had very set ideas of cleanliness and this was to get rid of any bugs that rested behind the skirting boards or behind old wall paper.
God help anyone if they had bugs.
She also used to rub paraffin on my head to keep lice away.
It kept everyone away never mind the ruddy lice.
The good old days!!!!!!!!




[aged attachment deleted by system]

[GrannyMac]

Some real hardship there, but you survived. The clothing ration list is really interesting. I'm looking forward to the next chapter!

[klondike]

Rationing was still around when I was born and I got caught out because of that just a few years back. There was a coal/coke ration and my parents moved from a rented house to one of their own. They had just bought a ton of coke and moved it to the new house. In my pram apparently.

Soon after they moved there was a flood and the cellar was flooded and when the water eventually went out down a drain the coke went with it. My father cemented a slab over the drain,

I inherited that house and decided to move into it after some modernisation. The cellar is damp and has a natural stream running under it which means it can get a shallow layer of water come up through the  brick floor. I dug a sump and put a pump in which emptied into the drain at the back of the house. It remained damp though and as I've no intention of keeping coke down there  and remembered why it the drain was capped off I removed the capping so the water could run away.

Then came some torrential rain. The house is at the bottom of a big hill and it looked like a river was flowing past. It filled the street drains. My cellar drain runs to the street drain and the level was way higher than my cellar floor which started back filling at an alarming rate getting to well over 2 feet deep. After doing a Corporal Jones for a while  and trying to block the inrush with towels I drove out and bought a second pump which along with the receding level brought things under control. Luckily it was all just rain water so not like the floods some face.

After that I reinstated the slab over the drain and put in a bigger pipe from the pump so it only very rarely gets damp down there now. I guess it proves that daddies always know best.