Sowing and Sewing.

At the bottom of our garden in Higgins lane was my dad’s green house, here he grew all sorts. 

                           He would start out with  vegetable plants like cabbage would be sown late in the winter so that they had a good start for the spring. Geraniums and bedding plants for the borders were grown in the spring, Tomatoes and cucumbers grew very well in the summer then he would grow bulbs to give as Christmas presents. The hyacinth bulbs were soaked in September,  planted in peat and forced to come into flower so that they would be ready at Christmas.

 One day in early December we noticed that the green house was all black on the inside. It looked like all the glass had been mirrored. Dad went down and found someone had been into the green house and messed about with the paraffin heater he used to keep it all warm. Everything was covered in soot, all the planted bulbs were ruined.

 He noticed that one bowl of hyacinths was missing so he called the police. They arrived and saw the mess, they said they knew who it would be and would be back in touch. When they returned the next day they asked could Dad go down to the station to have a look at something. He went down and  lo and behold there was the missing bowl of bulbs. The sergeant said the thief had given it to his Mum who had put in their front window. He was arrested and would be charged with theft and criminal damage. Dad asked if he could take the bulbs home and was told no as they were evidence. They sat in the police station and took pride of place until the trial in the new year. Dad was really disappointed that they never got any benefit from all the work he put into them.

                           Mum and Dad never had a lot of money and had to earn money in any way they could. Dad always had a second job working in the local pub Mum helped by using her skills as a seamstress. There was a man who used to call each week and he would bring work for Mum to do on the sewing machine. He was a tailor and his name was Mr Berman,  he was a big man I seem to remember, slightly balding with  pencil thin moustache and always jolly. His coat was thick wool with an astrakhan collar. He had a show room and office in Railway road in Ormskirk. Mum made clothes for him on her singer sewing machine, she would sit for hours on the treadle machine. It was piece work, so much per suit and there was a lot of sewing in the suits. He would bring the cut pieces with the paper patterns still attached to them or just a bolt of cloth with a paper pattern for mum to cut the cloth herself. She said liked to cut  it out herself because she could get the patterns on the cloth to run the right way, sometimes the tailor cut the cloth to save money rather than to make the patterns fit together properly.  She would also do alterations that were brought into the tailors as well.

                                I would sit and watch her swinging her foot back and forth to make the needle go up and down through the cloth. When she was not about I tried to get the treadle to go like mum did but could never get it go as smoothly. She also made dresses for friends and family to make a bit more money. They would come around and be measured, then mum would cut out the pattern on the dining table. It took hours of work to make some of the dresses. They would come back two or three times for fittings until the dress was finished. Some of the gowns she made were really fabulous creations for dinner dances and balls. My favorite were the wedding dresses, they looked like something out of fairy tales, with all the matching bridesmaid dresses too. Some had long trains with big head dresses and these took the longest to make. Mum made one set for a friend that took nearly six months of sewing, it had thousands of seed pearls sewn on to the bodices of the brides and three bridesmaids dresses. All the pearls had to be hand sewn, every thing had to be done with spotless hands because the slightest dirt would show up. The twins and I were not allowed anywhere near it.  Mum said she would never do anything like that again.

                                         She also made dolls clothes for Roddy Dolls in Southport. The clothes were like Barbie clothes today and they were very complicated I thought. She had to do lots of each design, like a air hostess uniform or tiny wedding dresses. There was even one outfit for a safari with little khaki shorts and shirts. Aurthurs the haberdashers in Burscough street  Ormskirk was another of her customers. She had to make loads of pillow cases for them once, the house was covered in white dust from the dressing on the white cotton for the pillow cases. I would hear the sewing machine going late into the night after we three kids had gone to bed.

                             One day she and Dad went out and got an electric sewing machine.Dad fitted the electric machine into the treadle base, it was so much quicker but I did miss playing on the treadle. Mum still has that machine today and does sewing jobs still even in her eighties.