My Brother John: How the Other Half Lived

By Mike Welsh

The book is a collection of memories of childhood and adolescence, of growing up as one of a family of seven in a small South Staffordshire mining village in the 1940s and 1950s. The family home had no electricity and relied on an open fire for all cooking and heating. The book looks at different aspects of life, such as earliest memories, starting school, wartime experiences, chores and scavenging for fuel, Christmas and leisure activities, immersing the reader in a time, which, though still within living memory is a world away from the 21st century. It is very much a personal account of how a less fortunate family coped in these difficult times and is very different from the usual memoirs of these times. Its final two chapters deal with the death of the parents, when the writer and his brother become the legal guardians of their five younger siblings and can now be considered as finally out of childhood and adolescence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398461161

Mike Welsh

The author was born a year before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was the oldest of seven children living in a small terraced house in a South Staffordshire village. After the early death of their parents, he and his brother became Legal Guardians of their younger siblings. He was the first from the village to attend university. He worked as an analytical chemist and as a lecturer in Science and Mathematics. He moved to Devon where he also taught English as a Foreign Language. Now retired, he lives with his wife in a hamlet near Totnes.

Book preview

About the Author

The author was born a year before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was the oldest of seven children living in a small terraced house in a South Staffordshire village. After the early death of their parents, he and his brother became Legal Guardians of their younger siblings. He was the first from the village to attend university. He worked as an analytical chemist and as a lecturer in Science and Mathematics. He moved to Devon where he also taught English as a Foreign Language. Now retired, he lives with his wife in a hamlet near Totnes.

Dedication

To my parents, Tom and Kathleen Welsh, who enriched our lives so much.

Copyright Information ©

Mike Welsh 2022

The right of Mike Welsh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398461154 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398461161 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgements

With thanks to

My wife, Helen, for her encouragement and patience.

My cousin, Margaret Cooper, who is a fount of family knowledge and has given me accounts of times beyond my memory.

Ray Deans, who first suggested that I should publish these memoirs.

My oldest friend, Tony Pemberton, whom I have known since primary school and who has kindly read and commented on various chapters.

Introduction

When my brother, John, died, I was asked if I could supply three or four anecdotes about his earlier life which could be used in the eulogy at the funeral. When I was told how interested his children were in these brief episodes, I decided to write a fuller account of our earlier years, particularly for them. What has resulted is by no means a chronological account of our childhood and adolescence, but a collection of memories divided into a series of topics. These are very much personal memories of a time far different from today. They may not be accurate in all respects, but this is how, after nearly three-quarters of a century, I remember things.

Week, Totnes Feb 2021

Part 1

1

I can’t remember a time before John. He was always there, an integral part of my childhood. When my sisters went to see Auntie Madge, they amused her by talking about our Michael and John as if we were a single entity. My earliest memories included and involved John. John was my brother. He was a year younger than me, or as my dad was fond of saying, twelve months and a fortnight, yet he was never my little brother or my kid brother. Of course, in the local way of speaking he was ‘Our Kid’; but then, to him, I was also ‘Our Kid’ and when other boys spoke of him to me, they referred to him as ‘Your Kid’. Mom called him Seaneen or Seaneen Bawn, a harking back to our Irish roots (although Mom’s mother had been English; her father, Grandad Naughton, was the first of his family to have been born in England and he had sung a principal role in the opera ‘The Lily of Killarney’ by Benedict, in which the heroine was ‘The Colleen Bawn’, meaning, the beautiful maid). Seaneen Bawn meant, beautiful (or handsome) little John. When I spoke to him, he was John and he always, or almost always, called me Mick. I knew when he was mad at me because he called me Micky. Later on, at St Chad’s, the Grammar School we both attended, he was known to his classmates as Dem or Deb. He was christened this by the class comedian, Flem; John mentioned that Dad suffered from industrial dermatitis and Flem was amused by the sound of the word and started calling John, Dematartis and the name stuck abbreviated to Dem and sometimes being rendered as Deb. Much later, as a joke, I called him by his second name, Patrick, which I never abbreviated to Pat and yet the letters I received from him when I was at university were signed ‘Pat’. Also, in our teens, I called him Shorty because, although he was never short, he wasn’t as tall as me. He returned the compliment by calling me Tich. It seems that when you are really fond of somebody, one name is just not enough.

There were family stories that John cried solidly for the first twelve months of his life. At the time, Cousin Margaret was just a young girl of nine or ten and lived about half a mile away across the fields in Fordbrook Lane. She would often come to help Mom with us when we were little and Mom frequently handed her a howling John, saying, See what you can do with Peter Grievous. Another story of John’s early howling relates to the time that we acquired one of the toys that became a permanent feature of the house, Big Teddy. The family were at Bloxwich Wakes, the annual Fair held in the town every September. It was a mining area and one of the local sayings was, as September came round, It’s Bloxwich Wakes, and the miners will soon be on full-time. During the summer when there was less demand for coal the miners were laid off for several days a week. Anyhow, at the fair, Gran’s number had come up on the Flashing Numbers stall and she turned to Mom who was holding John, whose crying was drowning out the music of the steam organ on the Gallopers, the calling of the man at the Boxing Booth inviting all comers to have a few rounds with the resident chap to earn a few bruises and a few bob and the shrieks of the terrified girls on the Chairoplanes and asked her what prize she should choose. Mom suggested something that might keep John quiet, and Gran chose Big Teddy. This of course was before I could remember.

One of my earliest memories is of the two of us being dressed in our teddy bear coats ready to be taken out. The coats were made of fur fabric, which Auntie Gladys had come by, and which had been made into coats by Mrs Warr of Fishley. I remember going to her cottage along the lane through the fields bordering the canal to be measured for various items of clothing and sitting looking at her large polished mahogany chest of drawers in her cosy sitting room. Years later, when Big Teddy became threadbare, the material from the coats was used to re-cover Big Teddy. Another very early memory when I was less than three years of age involved John and the little Hornby train set that we had. Somebody had probably given it to us when their child no longer played with it; it certainly wasn’t brand new. The engine and rolling stock disappeared early on, they were probably broken and thrown out, but the track lived on in the bottom of the front room cupboard next to the gas meter. Dad was trying to set up the track and John kept picking up the rails and whacking them like sticks. One of the rails was not as shiny as the rest and obviously from a different set, so Dad gave it to John to play with and he was quite happy and didn’t hinder the set-up anymore.

We lived in a little house, the end but one in a row of eight. Beyond the end house was a large garden, which was shared between the people in the end house and Den Martin who lived next door but one. The house was constructed of single brick and had two rooms upstairs and two downstairs, the back-room downstairs being the living room. This room had a quarry-tiled floor which was covered with lino, worn through in parts and in various places the lino was covered by small rugs. The hearthrug was a rag rug, which was replaced when worn out, by one which we ourselves would make from a hessian sugar bag, obtained from the grocers, and old clothing, which was cut into small strips and pegged into the sacking with a bodger. The house had no electricity and although we had gas, it was only used for lighting, so that all the cooking, even boiling the water to make a cup of tea or do any washing, was done over the fire. Consequently, we had a fire going winter and summer. The fire never went out at night; just before going to bed Dad would put a large piece of coal (the raker) on and this burnt slowly through the night and was broken up with the poker in the morning to form the basis of the next day’s fire. This procedure was obviously a regular thing in the mining communities. Apparently in my grandparents’ house, when one of their daughters brought home a boyfriend, my grandfather would infer that it was time for him to go by putting coal on the fire and saying, After that, the raker’s going on.

So, although we had freezing bedrooms in the winter, it was always warm when we got downstairs. The fireplace was the focus of the living room. It was a black grate with two hobs, the hot hob on the right above the oven and the cool hob on the left. The teapot was permanently on the hot hob and after a time the tea became ‘stewed’, and a fresh pot was made. A cup of tea was always on tap. Above one hob was the crane, which swung out over the fire so that the kettle could be suspended from it on pothooks. In the oven was a removable shelf, the oven plate, which was used, wrapped in newspapers, as a bed warmer. This of course provided only one bed warmer so a couple of house bricks would be put in the oven on a winter evening and at bedtime taken out and crammed somehow into Quaker Oats packets to provide warmers for the other beds. These were better than the oven plate because they held the heat longer. The grate was polished with black lead and the tiled hearth with Cardinal (red) polish. Later, we had an enamelled iron hearth plate with a tiled pattern to cover the real quarry tiles. This could be cleaned by simply wiping with the floor cloth. When the ashes were removed from under the fire each day, they were sifted for cinders, which were then returned to the fire and burnt with a most pleasing brightness. There was a detachable iron rack which could be hooked over the bars of the fire grate to hold two flat irons of the sort sold in antique shops as doorstops, where they were heated to do the ironing. There was no ironing board, the ironing was done, as were all tasks, on the kitchen table. Above the fireplace was the mantelpiece which accommodated the clock, two vases, a crucifix, the biscuit barrel, the button tin, and other odds and ends, including Dad’s loose change and the letters we had received, which were stuffed behind one of the vases. Over the mantelshelf hung a brown plaque with cream letters on it. When I first saw it, it was above the mantelpiece at Gran’s and I thought it was a bar of chocolate. When Gran left to go with Uncle Jack and Auntie Mollie to live in Coalpool, we acquired the plaque and it stayed there above the mantelpiece with the palms from the previous Easter until the family finally left prior to the house being demolished. The words on the plaque were:

‘Mother.

A wonderful being is Mother,

Only she in truth understands you,

She loves cares for and looks after you,

Forgives everything you do.

Her presence is never realised,

Until she is called away.’

In the centre of the living room was a kitchen table three feet square with leaves, which probably increased its size to three feet by five feet (90cm x 150cm). We certainly needed all of that when the family of nine sat down to a meal. The tabletop was unvarnished wood and was scrubbed each day. It served as the only place to sit and eat, play board games, draw, and paint, do homework (for those of the family who did it, I’m afraid I was rarely into it myself), or do cutting out and making things like model theatres usually from cereal packets. Dad’s chair was the armchair under the window. It was a tradition in those days that the man of the house had his own particular chair. I was told that on one occasion, in our grandparents’ house, my grandad’s friend came to visit and when my uncle, who was a little boy at the time, came into the room, he said disapprovingly to the visitor, You’re sitting in my dad’s chair. Opposite Dad’s chair was Mom’s chair, an armchair with wooden arms and behind this in the corner, was the door to the stairs, which led to the two bedrooms upstairs. Along the wall, opposite the fireplace, there was a sideboard, and on the wall above it was a mirror in a ‘silver’ frame, flanked by two pencil sketches of rural scenes in small black frames. To the right, was the door to the pantry where any perishable food was kept. The idea of a fridge was beyond the imagination. In the winter, a washing line was strung from above the pantry door to the wall opposite, so that the washing could hang there just above and in front of the sideboard. From the other corner of the living room, an archway led to the front room and on the left just before the front room door was another door to ‘under the stairs’. This door had no handle and was opened by inserting the blade of the smaller pair of scissors into the lock and turning. Under the stairs was used as a shelter during air raids. On one occasion, when I was about four, Mom was in there and the door closed. She began to panic; she didn’t realise that I would be able to find the scissors and open the door. Later on, this area became a sort of junk room.

The front room was, as was traditional, the room for special occasions although I can never remember it being used as such. It had wooden floorboards stained with potassium permanganate to make them dark brown. When there was a problem with the chimney in the living room, we lived in the front room, coping with the small fireplace until we could move back. During the war, the bed I shared with John was in the front room under the window and during an air raid the front window was shattered and the glass fell on our bed. As the family grew, two bedrooms were not enough and so the front room became Mom and Dad’s bedroom, leaving the boys in the back room upstairs, at first two of us in a double bed and later a small single bed was introduced as the family grew and Peter joined us. The girls had the front room, also with a double bed which was later augmented by a pair of bunk beds to accommodate the four girls. I suppose we were more fortunate than the girls because the back room was over the living room, which had the fire. However, in the depths of winter, it still got bitterly cold with ice on the inside of the windowpanes and a howling gale blowing through the rattling frames. Then we augmented the bedclothes with old coats on top of the eiderdown. What John and I really hated was putting a foot through a threadbare sheet to be irritated by the feel of the woolly blanket. There were no gaslights in the bedrooms, only in the front and back rooms downstairs, so it really was a case of ‘here comes a candle to light you to bed’.

The living room was connected to the single-storey back kitchen or scullery by the passage, a narrow place between the pantry and the door that opened onto the back yard, which was paved with blue bricks. The scullery, or ‘brew’se’ as our next-door neighbour called it, had the only water supply in the house, a cold tap over a brown earthenware sink. In the corner, to the left of the sink was a large copper bowl set