The interior of the house and the fittings were, I suppose, the height of development at that time. In the front room was a large range which supplied hot water. After six months the cooking range was found to be inefficient and was replaced. We had electric lighting, a separate bathroom built into the corner of the kitchen with running hot water from a back boiler, supplying hot water over the sink as well as for the bath. All the ceilings were done with square asbestos panels. There was an outside flush toilet and a coal house (both in the entrance porch for the back door). Window frames were made of steel and the panels below the windows outside and in were made half height of the standard panel. The greatest problem was condensation and in winter the walls were often wet through. This never seemed to have any serious effect on living or on health; it was just a nuisance. The house was a good idea in conception but had snags in practice.
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 were three bedrooms, two with coal fires. These were 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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