My Sainted Father

My sainted father (and I say sainted because he raised four daughters, and I was clearly the most well behaved) would have had his 97th birthday on Friday, so in honour of him, I am dedicating some of my blogs this week to his story. He was a gifted writer, and after several entreaties, he agreed to document his life so that his grandchildren who did not have the opportunity to spend much time with him when he was alive, would have the chance to get to know him through his own words. 

My father, Sidney (the sixth of nine children) was born in 1917 during the First World War. His father worked in a "Reserved Occupation" and it was considered more important for him to continue his work in England, than fight in the trenches in France. So in his own words....

         .....My home was a very small, old cottage. When the cottage was built, it stood alone in a large empty area between Shedfield and Bishop’s Waltham. Shedfield had two shops; Bishop’s Waltham was our local shopping centre and boasted a whole street of shops, a flour mill, cinema (the cost of a Saturday morning movie was 3 pence); and the ruins of a bishops’ castle.

            The cottage was probably a woodman’s cottage and it was the oldest house in the area.  In solitary houses a well was obligatory, but before I was born a water main had been installed 50 yards away, and my father had a pipe laid to the house. At the end of the water-main pipe was a single tap that was installed in the washhouse. This was a small room attached to the end of the house. It contained a large copper boiler, fuelled by wood, to supply hot water for the weekly clothes wash and family baths. No daily showers or baths in those days.

            In the washhouse there was a large bench and scrubbing board, and a huge iron mangle through which the clothes were squeezed to remove surplus water; a poor substitute for a modern spin dryer. This mangle would never pass the safety standards of today. It had huge open draining wheels and two large wooden rollers.

            Mother was the washing machine. All clothing, such as shirts, socks, and so on, was worn for a week and it was all collected in the washhouse on Mondays, along with bedding. The copper boiler was lit early in the morning, and then Mother spent hours scrubbing and rubbing with a huge bar of yellow soap, soaking, mangling, and finally hanging all the clean washing on a long clothes line. A rainy Monday was a disaster, with wet clothes hanging everywhere indoors. Mother never stopped running on a Monday. She still had her daily housework to do, bringing in the coal and water, and preparing a cooked meal for the family after work.

            Mondays must have been days when Mother wished she had never married, but on my school holidays when she and I were alone together I would be in the wash house with her, filling the copper, tending the fire, and turning the mangle; I don’t think I ever heard her complain.....

To be continued.