Between the Sticks. Alan Hodgkinson
the other dads I knew were also miners but they spent little time with their kids. In the 1940s, as now, a mother knew everything about her children – the scabs, nits, bad teeth, best friends, favourite foods, constipation, shoes that didn’t fit properly, romances, secret fears, hopes and dreams – but most fathers were only vaguely aware of the small people living in the house. Not so my dad.
Home was a two-up-two-down red-brick terraced house on Station Road in Laughton Common. People stayed in their jobs in those days and they stayed in their houses too. It was unheard of for couples to set up home before they were married. Once they had, the vast majority stayed put until the time came for their children to call the funeral director. There were no nursing homes, no managed flats for the elderly. A house was bought or rented and turned into a home by women like my mum. At various times it was also a nursery (though no one ever used the term ‘nursery’ in the 1940s), a hospital, classroom, party function room, music hall stage, a rest home and, in the vast majority of cases, in the end, a chapel of rest for those who had purchased the house in the first place.
Internally and externally, the houses took on the character of their occupants. From either end of Station Road the terraced houses all looked the same, but as a boy I soon learned the subtle individualities of each one. It was the small touches – invariably the mother’s – that gave them their identity. The highly polished brass letterbox on the front door of the Coopers’; the pristine gold-leaf house number on the fanlight over the front door of the Cartwrights’ (as a boy I had no idea why this number had survived intact when all the others had become mottled and flaked with age); the net curtains in the front window of the Thompsons’, gathered rather than hanging straight as in every other home; the red glass vase, no more than four inches high, that balanced precariously on the narrow window ledge in the Smiths’ front window.
Those surnames were all traditional, straightforward, dependable, no-nonsense names, most of which owed their origin to some trade or other. When I was a boy it was said Sheffield boasted more Smiths than anywhere else in England, until, as Dad once joked, the title was taken one weekend by a cheap hotel in Brighton.
Fresh flowers were a rarity in the houses. In the summer, Mum would occasionally give me a threepenny bit (just over 1p) and send me across to the allotments which were, in the main, rented by miners. I would ask the allotment owner, ‘Have you any chrysanths you don’t want?’ Chrysanths – that was all the miners who ran the allotments seemed to grow in the way of flowers. With their football-like blooms (there was even a species called ‘Football Mums’) and tall stems, these flowers dominated the small living rooms of the houses they fleetingly graced.
Keen to make threepence and offload my surplus flowers, I would find myself skipping home with an enormous bunch of earwig-infested chrysanths. Mum would indeed marvel at them before cutting their stems and displaying them in two or often three vases around the house. I only realised their full name, chrysanthemums, when I was in my mid-teens. True, chrysanths runs off the tongue a lot easier but, looking back, there might have been another reason for the shortened name. Chrysanthemum sounds Latin, something only posh kids learned. In Sheffield and Rotherham in the forties such class distinction was as clearly drawn by the working class as it was by the middle and upper classes, and you wouldn’t want to be accused of getting above your station.
Mum organised the house and family life and we functioned to a tried-and-tested routine. We had no bathroom; we washed twice daily at the kitchen sink, usually with cold water. In keeping with every family I knew, Friday night was bath night. Dad would take down the tin bath from its hook in the backyard shed. It would be placed on newspaper in front of the living-room fire and laboriously filled by Dad with kettles of hot water. First to go was Dad, then my sister, followed by my two brothers, then me. Being the fifth user of the same bath water it’s a wonder I didn’t get out dirtier than when I got in.
It seems unbelievable now, but Friday night was the only time in the week when I changed my underpants and vest. Again, we were not unique in this, every family I knew changed underwear weekly. There were no modern labour-saving devices such as washing machines. Mum washed our clothes every Monday, in the kitchen, with a tub and dolly, after which she would hand-rinse everything then put all the washing through a hand-operated wringer before hanging it out to dry, or, in the event of rain, on wooden clothes horses which were dotted around the living room or placed in front of the ‘range’ fire. Come Tuesday they were dry. On Wednesday they were ironed and then put away in wooden drawers that smelled of lavender and mothballs, ready for us to wear again on Friday after our bath, and so the cycle was repeated. Mum’s life must have been as monotonous as mutton, as regular as the roll of an army drum. That my childhood was such a happy one, secure and filled with a warm heart is to her eternal credit.
Saturday was football day, but for the vast majority of Laughton Common women and, I would suggest, women everywhere, it was the day they had their hair done. It was the time of ‘Twink’ perms for women and an entirely different type of perm for the menfolk.
Come the weekend, the women of Laughton Common would buy a Twink perm in their quest to have glamorous hair, if only for a couple of days. I recall my mother and neighbouring women spending most of Saturday with myriad purple plastic grips in their hair which to me looked like small chicken bones. Around these purple ‘bones’ they wrapped strands of hair and tissue paper. I never knew the reason for the tissue paper and still don’t; it was minutiae from a mysterious female world that, for all it touched mine, was to remain beyond my ken.
The permed hair would be protected from the elements and sooty Sheffield air with a headscarf. Just about every woman in Laughton Common sported a headscarf on a Saturday, though the effect alluded more to ‘Old Mother Riley’ than Grace Kelly in an open-top sports car.
On a Saturday it was not only the women who talked of perms but the menfolk too, though the perms the men discussed were far removed from the Twink variety. For most working men the only way to escape their frugal lifestyle and the daily grind of work at the colliery would be to win the ‘Pools’. The Pools, or ‘coupon’ as they were also known, was the dream ticket out of a life of working drudgery.
I was three years old when war was declared, and nine when it ended. It would be an exaggeration to say the tranquillity of life was shattered; war in all its horror didn’t descend on Laughton Green, but it is equally true to say that life was never the same again. There were no dog fights in blue skies strewn with the spaghetti of vapour trails. No trains departing from Station Road with carriages full of husbands and sons waving to the tear-stained faces of loved ones. No wailing air-raid sirens. No need for us to take to the Anderson shelter every night. No houses or factories ablaze.
But if our village didn’t warrant the destructive attention of the Luftwaffe, Sheffield, the city built on steel manufacture, was an entirely different matter. On several occasions I can recall my family and me joining neighbours in a back garden to witness the city suffer a horrendous pounding four miles away. The sloe-coloured sky hummed to the drone of bombers from which there seemed no respite. Ack-ack guns thumped away in the dark distance. The sky flashed and flared. The sound of thunder beset Sheffield most nights. I remember one particular night when I was around seven years old, the thunderous sound was accompanied by a thin red line in the sky above Sheffield. Within half an hour it had billowed into a crimson aura that lit up the surrounding countryside for miles. Sheffield, the city where my football heroes dwelled, was ablaze. Only then did the ghostly droning sound in the darkness of the sky depart.
As a miner, Dad was considered essential to the war effort, which meant he could not be called up. The raw materials needed to help fight the war included leather. Even after the war, it remained scarce, so leather footballs were non-existent around Laughton Common. Even if the ‘sell everything’ shop on Station Road had stocked leather footballs, I doubt if the hard-pressed budgets of most parents could have run to buying one.
The father of one of my pals worked in the local butcher’s. The bladder of a pig is not too dissimilar to the rubber bladder that was inserted inside the leather ‘casey’ or caseball. From as early as I can remember, until I was around ten or eleven years of age, we boys played football on the local rec with a pig’s bladder.
Pigs’ bladders are surprisingly durable. Given