competition entry

Our House

It was nearly the end of May and the days were getting longer and brighter. The sun smiled through the tiny window of my attic bedroom, lighting a rectangle of polished oilcloth on the floor at the foot of my bed. How I loved that oilcloth so lovingly polished with lavender wax so that the room always smelled of spring, even in the middle of winter. Helping Mam to polish that floor every week was one chore I never moaned about, I was real proud of the shine on my bedroom floor. Indeed I was proud of this quaint little room up in the roof of the small colliery cottage that Mam, Dad and my sister called home. The village, which comprised of two streets of similar terraced cottages and a collection of larger houses across the main road, sat neatly outside the railings and gates of the coalmine that gave the village its name; but to all who lived there the village was simply the “Colliery”. In fact it wasn’t until I began school that I realised that the two terraces had real names, we knew them as Front Street and Back Street. Apart from the houses of the managers and officials across the road all the terraced cottages were identical, typical two up, two down houses. That is to say there were two main rooms downstairs, the kitchen was our main living room where we lived, cooked and ate, the front room was reserved for entertaining and special occasions although in our case it was also Mam and Dad’s bedroom so that me and our kid could have our own bedrooms upstairs. My little sisters bedroom was the biggest, she had bigger toys, but it had no window. Instead there was a skylight in the roof which made it a bit darker. I had the front room which did have a window but the sloping roof came so low that my window was only about two feet high and almost at floor level. The sloping roof was a bit of a nuisance as I had to stoop to get round the bed when I remade it every morning. There was no electricity, we had gaslights downstairs but had to use candles or paraffin lamps upstairs. The house did not have a bathroom either; hanging from a nail on the outside wall of the house was a big tin bathtub which had to be filled with hot water from the copper next to the coal fire by hand. As we got older this was used hardly at all, we went to Aunty Annie’s for a bath as she lived in a council house in town and had a proper bathroom, failing that we could always go to the showers used by the miners at the pithead baths between shifts at weekends, men on Saturdays and Women on Sundays but Mam did not like it because there was no privacy and she was a bit prudish, was my Mam ,and said she didn’t like the idea of neighbours gawping at her’. What they thought or said always seemed very important to her. She always insisted that we should never look scruffy or untidy and that we should remember our manners.
“I don’t want the neighbours to think you’re not well brought up”, she would say spitting on her hankie to remove a dirty smudge from my face or rolling up a shirt sleeve to hide the fact that a button was missing from the cuff.
There was a tiny scullery, which was really a big pantry with a wash basin.
Outside in the backyard were the lavatory and the coalhouse. From the front room a door opened out onto the front garden, but as long as we lived in that cottage I never ever saw that door opened and we never played in the garden, it was for growing things in.
We loved the kitchen where a huge coal fire burned all year round to heat the water in a boiler next to it for washing and bathing and the built in oven where Mam made the best bread and cakes in the world. At night the fire’s warm glow made the light from the spluttering gas mantles softer, as we listened to our favourite wireless programmes on the huge old radio powered by its double acid accumulators that we changed every week when the accumulator man, in his heavy rubber apron, carefully brought in the replacements while we kept well out of his way. One day he showed me what the acid could do when he spilt some on a piece of rag out in the street, the acid smoked and the rag turned brown and just smouldered away to ash. That big old wireless was our main source of
entertainment. I Loved the War of the Worlds and Workers Playtime, Mam liked Billy Cotton and Family Favourites but none of us liked the football results on a Saturday when we were forced into strict silence while Dad checked his football pools coupon.
“Accrington Stanley let me down again”
Summer was coming and we could spend hour after hour outdoors playing and exploring, the “Three Musketeers”, we were called in the village; Me Bill and Eddie, because we were always together; we were the only kids of the same age in the whole village except for Elizabeth but she was a girl and that didn’t count; mind you Eddie was lucky to be a Musketeer because he was eighteen months younger than us.
At the end of the summer things would be different because I was off to the Grammar School and Bill was going to the Technical Secondary Modern, Eddie would be staying in the village school until his eleven plus. I was the first kid from the village that had passed for the grammar school in over ten years Miss Henderson said I was the school’s prize pupil and she gave me a fountain pen in a box, I was really pleased and Mam was as proud as could be, mind you Dad wasn’t too sure he said Grammar schools were too posh and not for the likes of us and that I would be better off going to the Tech with Bill where I would get an education that would best suit me for a job when I left school but Mum would not hear of it;
“You go to the Tech if you fail the eleven plus, not when you pass it Dad!!” but she still worried a bit about the expense of the new school uniform after she read the letter from the Grammar school.
Anyway it didn’t matter to me, I was going. I had a Board of Education certificate and a new Smith’s pocket watch and chain from Mam and Dad and ten bob from my nanna and Aunty Hetty to go towards things I would need, mind you uncle Ken gave me his old compasses and set squares and Mrs Davison from next door gave me a real leather satchel that was her Tommy’s when he was at the Grammar school ten years ago; he was in the Durham Light Infantry with uncle Ken on National Service and soon they were going to the jungle in Malaya.
I did not know it at the time but going to Grammar school would be one of the biggest changes in my life and proved that my old Dad knew a thing or two.