The children separated themselves into well defined age groups. All were guarded communally and certain neighbours acted as locum parentis whenever it was necessary. I can still recite all the names “on our side of the street” starting with next door: Harrison, Cooper, Charles, Myring, Birbeck, Soars, Frost, Me(?) Litelmede, Hunt, Obern.
The semi-detached house stood back from the road; a fence on the right hand side and a fence at the far end of the back garden separated us from the fields. Directly facing the back door was a high wooden fence for privacy, not that great store was placed on privacy—neighbours were frequent visitors to each others’ doors in search of wandering children, and messages were relayed to other children by this means. Even when quite small the street was as much a playground as the garden, although it was around about 1930 that Humberstone park was opened.
I remember the house as being enormous but it was not that big at all. It is surprising how scale alters with age. Furniture was very sparse; two wooden kitchen chairs, a scrubbed deal table and a square of turkey pattern linoleum in the centre of the front room. The other room downstairs—the kitchen—had a mangle; a big one with wooden rollers that folded down to make a table. There was a sink and draining board. There was a high chair for me, one that had gone right through the family, and my sister had a small armchair, a present from her uncle Frank, slightly later she got a wooden kitchen chair to add to the two already owned.
Upstairs was just as sparsely furnished although my parents had a bedroom suite. Both my sister, Jessie, and myself had comfortable beds. They were iron bedsteads with a stretched wire mesh and on top of this was the solid mattress covered with a mattress cover, a flock bed was on top of this and these were all made in striped ticking material. A task every year was to empty the flocks out of the mattress and have covers washed and the flocks aired ready for the following year. I remember once when I was small thinking how nice and soft this pile of flocks looked so I jumped right into the middle of the pile and the subsequent cloud filled the room and all the flocks had to be swept up and cleaned from the dust to be used again. It must have impressed me as I remember getting into serious trouble for the act. On the whole they were very comfortable and warm to sleep on.
Most of my clothes as a very small child were made from other clothes by hand by my mother, and one of her first acquisitions was a sewing machine. Auntie Em lived with us for a while after the death of great aunt Bessie and when she came she brought her sewing machine, which originally had been aunt’s, it was a hand machine and when Aunt Em left to go and live with my uncle Frank my mother bought her machine and I have lots of memories of having to try on various half-finished garments and waiting impatiently for new shirts and trousers etc. It wasn’t until I had been about two years at school that I got my first new shop-bought clothes.
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