SATURDAY, 19 DECEMBER 2009 Winter!

Childhood memories

This is my mum, Ethel Smith. I have been writing a lot about my dad, now 91, and as he has now moved it has stirred a lot of memories. 

My mum died aged just 70 in 1990, so dad has been a widower for 20 years in 2010.

The photo was taken at Rawtenstall market, when the local paper was doing a shopper's survey. 
It's how I remember my mum, smiling. 
Last night was so cold that I thought of one of her sayings " It's cold when you move." 
We had no central heating in the house where I was born, and dad stoked up the coal fire ready to be lit each morning downstairs. 
















Here is a photo of the back of the street in which I lived until I was 13 years old. 
Once we were all snugly ensconsed in front of the blazing coals in the grate, in the winter months, in the evening, or indeed anytime, when you moved into the small out-kitchen you did feel the drop in temperature!!
Going to bed in the winter was challenging in our two up two down small terraced home. 
There were no carpets upstairs, just what we called oilcloth on the floor. It was a forerunner of linoleum or vinyl covering. 
If you did not wear your slippers, your feet hit the icy cold of its smooth surface. 
My sister and I shared a room at the back, looking over the factory roof, towards the big woods on the hillside opposite.
Commonly known as "Brook's Woods" as a landowner named Cicely Brooks lived in Crawshaw Hall, and the grounds 
included the wood. 
In the mornings of the depths of winter time,the bedroom window could be covered on the inside with a beautiful frost pattern. A whole world of filigree and fronds, a veritable forest of ice. I would make a hole in the pattern with the end of one of my fingers, and the ice would melt slowly around it, slipping downwards making a trail as it moved.
My mum would make breakfast porridge to stoke me up before I walked to school a half mile or so away. 
I watched it bubbling in the pan making miniature volcanoes! Then she poured it into our bowls and laced it with milk and syrup!! And out I went in the cold.My sister being 5 years younger than myself did not begin school until I was 10 years old. We moved house when I was 13 and she was 8 years old to the home which has now been sold. 

I realised that I have a very visual memory, which is probably why from an early age I loved to draw and paint. I used to paint pictures using poster paint on the plaster of the attic walls at the first house where I was born, in February 1948. 
At school I loved the art lessons. At Primary school in the 1950's these consisted of little more than painting using powered paint mixed in old jam jars, on fairly cheap paper. 


Or making papier maché plates which we then painted and took home. 
I also remember basket making using supple canes, and weaving.
I guess just after the war years it was difficult to find funding for more exotic pastimes!! But we didn't know any difference. 
But it is the winter of which I now write. 
It always seemed to snow..........but there again maybe that's how I remember it. We had two yards at the school in the picture, one for the girls and one for the boys. When it was particulary cold and snowy, and the frost had frozen the snow, we were allowed to play outside at breaktimes, and more often than not constructed what we called "bottle ice" slides. These were such fun and exhilarating to use. 
We made them by charging at a terrific pace and then began to slide along the top of the frozen snow, and as we continually repeated this action the result was a long shiny slide of ice along the playground flags, which were covered by freezing cold whiteness!!
Health and Safety would have banned them completely now!! Spoil sports!!
We did not come to any harm save for the occasional tumble if we overbalanced and it was great exercise outdoors making our feet and fingers tingle and our cheeks glow. 
And the subzero temperatures here last night brought these memories to mind.
More to come.............................................