Excerpt from Chapter 1

..........Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that my Mother was some kind of lost little woman in a strange town. She just wasn’t like that. She was six feet tall and well built to begin with and one legend that went with her was that a man once made improper advances to her twin sister. This resulted in him being lifted off his feet by the neck and held against a wall by my Mother until his face turned blue. She was not to be crossed lightly.

     When she arrived in Northampton, the family remained split up with various families in the town. Where she herself stayed at the beginning, I have no idea. She was never very forthcoming on that subject and, as you will see, my own background was confusing to say the least.

     I do know that, before too long, she managed to get a job at a local dairy (Bramptons). It didn’t pay too well but there was a house that went with the job. A little house at 3 Oakley Street, which was one of many, built, back-to-back in terraces for the labourers who built the railways in the days of Queen Victoria.

     Of course they were quite primitive in those days. No one had a bathroom or an inside toilet. There was literally a tin bath, which could be placed in the kitchen and filled from a copper boiler, fuelled by an open fire, also supplying the warmth to get undressed by. Imagine the scene when Mum was taking her weekly (or fortnightly) bath in the kitchen and one of the kids wanted to go to the outside toilet. This meant getting the candle and the old newspaper, averting their eyes as they passed through the kitchen and going up the garden to the toilet.

     I wasn’t there for that of course but I know it was so because it hadn’t changed much when I came on the scene. The Mangle. This was the other ubiquitous item in those houses. If bathing was not a certain activity every week, the Monday washing certainly was. It was done in the same, open fired copper boiler with a washboard and lots of hard work. The housewives would spend many hours putting each washed item through the rollers of the Mangle and squeezing the water out of them before filling the line with the billowing garments. Well, not too many garments because not too many people wore underclothes and even shirts only got changed when they needed it.............