My mother augmented my father’s wages by taking in washing which she used to do for a family on the Uppingham Road. It had to be done immaculately and ironed and folded exactly. All the preparations were well known to me. First the dolly tub, then the clothes and sheets etc. into the boiler, after boiling transfer to the dolly tub with huge ladles of scalding water. There, the clothes were pounded with the dolly pegs which later graduated to a punch. A cup of Camomile tea and back to work! The clothes put through the mangle and all the soapy water extracted, the dolly tub emptied refilled with clean cold water and the clothes rinsed to get rid of the soap, mangled again and into the blue water. From there. they were folded and mangled again, then to the starch for the articles that needed it, on to the clothes line—carried out in what to me was an enormous basket—to be pegged out neatly along the line. When they were dry, the next ritual of ironing, then a neat parcel of clothes tied with string and placed on the end of my pram for delivery to collect a very small amount of cash and the possibility of a couple of sweets on the way home.
One incident I remember vividly is the accident I suffered when I was about two years old. I ran into the kitchen, fell over against the clothes boiler and knocked the tap which poured boiling water all over my shoulder. It didn’t seem serious at first but as my clothes were taken off the skin came off with them. I didn’t cry—my mother said I suppose that was because of shock. What I do remember very clearly is the treatment. After initial panic my mother sent for Mrs Cooper, her friend and mentor, whose advice was to go to the doctor. However, the initial inspection didn’t seem to be too bad and as I hadn’t cried, this reinforced the idea of not being too serious. The following morning I was running a temperature and it was obviously a lot more serious than thought. My mother panicked, thinking she would be accused of child cruelty, because of the delay and between herself and Mrs. Cooper when they decided to treat the scald themselves. The treatment was making a large poultice of lint and an ointment called “Germolene” which was changed daily. However, the situation worsened and I can well remember laying on my mother’s knee and having this very cooling poultice changed. I know that she never went to bed for about a week and I remember drifting in and out of waking and sleeping in a world that seemed very strange. Finally things got better and I recovered fully from the scald.
The scar originally was enormous, halfway down my back, under my arm and on the top of my shoulder. It was vivid red and all the guides and pattern of destroyed flesh could be plainly seen and I was ashamed to take my shirt off until I started secondary school, many years later. In infant school I was examined by the school nurse and doctor and they thought that the healing was quite remarkable. I had to perform all sorts of movements to show there was no loss of use. The holes in the flesh were large enough to get a child’s little finger into to nearly the depth of the first joint. Nowadays I never think about it and the scar has not grown with the surrounding tissue so it is proportionately smaller, and the colour has paled into insignificance.
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