EARLY YEARS & LINEAGE
0038 Nana Lane, 1895
My grandmother
My maternal grandmother's background was rather different to the rural origins of my grandfather. She was brought up in the city of Leeds, and her father was a boilermaker. That didn’t, though, mean he was one of the brawny men who hammered steel in someone else's factory. Instead, it meant that he owned a factory which made boilers, then one of the main high-tech pieces of equipment in the 19th century. So why wasn't the family fortune passed down, in part of least, to me? The answer was that my great-grandfather was a man of very particular judgment. He drank himself to death at almost exactly the same time as he drank away the profits of company and it went bankrupt!
My grandmother was in fact older than my grandfather, perhaps a trait which carried on to my generation and beyond. To me she always seemed very old, though her generation always dressed old. But as with most women in the those days she had relatively little to say about her background, though we knew more about her relatives - who still lived on in Leeds - than we did about my grandfather's family.
Edna, Herbert & Lily – in the playground of their school
We
used, in particular, to go across and stay with
a
family whose husband had suffered greatly from being unemployed for most of
the Depression. He
eventually got a poorly paid job as a school caretaker -- but with the advantage
that it came with a house. I remember that house well; it was a tall, very
tall, house on the edge of the school playground. The kitchen was in the
basement, which is where we all used to congregate. My bedroom, on the other
hand, was right up on the top floor - next to the loosely boxed in bathroom; to
which I remember people coming and going as I tried to sleep.
For me it was a wonderful opportunity, seeing we visited in the school holidays, to raid the classrooms and play with the children's toys; which my own school would never have deigned to possess – such trivia were only for those lowly mortals who didn’t have the intellect for proper learning! I have this memory of wandering around the school playground defiantly hammering away at a toy drum which I'd taken from one of the classrooms. But, above all, I remember the smell of disinfectant which used to permeate the classrooms.
I don't know what it was about the place, but it just had the feel of industrial Britain. Where I normally lived in one or other form of suburbia, this was clearly located in the inner-city. The playground was built up above the surrounding area, so that from the edge of it you looked down onto the streets of back-to-back housing; which we saw as the deprived slums of the time, though they must have been in fact the home to strong communities.
As I say
though, I knew relatively little about the background of my grandmother on that
side. To me she was a small plump figure who rarely said much. I appreciated,
though her Yorkshire cooking. It was wonderful to eat her Yorkshire pudding
with gravy, eaten before the main course as it should be. In particular I loved
her new cake, bread baked without yeast and eaten deliciously warm straight out
of the oven. And there was always parkin, a ginger tasting cake, at Christmas.
It was still a time when cookery was based on local specialties. Thus, for
example, Merseyside’s specialty was ‘scouse’ - a form of stew – or quite
frequently ‘blind scouse’ where the meat was missing because the family couldn’t
afford to buy it! Indeed the
main food of the masses was the ‘jam buttie’. A piece of bread smeared on one
side with butter – or more usually margarine – and jam, which was the staple
diet of Liverpool children. The bread though was delicious, before sliced
steamed bread replaced taste with convenience. I used to cut the cobs we bought,
a hemi-spherical bread almost the size of a football, into half inch thick
slices. Even we in the middle-class used to
have sandwiches for tea, with our only hot meal at lunch;
or d
inner
as we northerners called it. Mind you we used to sometimes
replace the jam with meat or fish paste. And we often finished tea
with cake. Mind you, we always drank tea. We simply didn’t think of drinking
coffee. That only became
fashionable,
amongst even the avant garde, until the late 1950s.
The family in wartime
When my mother’s relatives came across from Leeds, they brought baloney, a local form of liver pate; as if – stranded in some foreign land - we needed food parcels.
Despite her silences, my grandmother did have a significant impact on my grandfather, not least because - in the early part of the 20th century - he was considering emigrating to Canada. At that time, and for much of the first part of century right up to the 1960s, I guess most people did seriously consider emigrating to get away from the deprivations at home. My own family seriously considered emigrating to New Zealand, and have from time to time to time regretted not doing so ever since. Equally my grandfather didn't go to Canada. This is partly because his teaching qualification wouldn't have been recognised in Canada, and he would have had to start all over again. My mother, though, believed a far more important reason was that my grandmother wouldn't have trusted him alone in Canada for the several months before she could join him. She knew a side of him of which I was not aware until much later. He was seemingly very much the ladies man and sowed some wild oats from time to time. It is not something you even consider when your elders seem so much older - so close to death -- when in reality they're probably in midlife crisis instead.
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