At the age of almost four I went to stay with my nana and grand dad Cheetham. They had a big house in Christ Church, Aughton. It was situated on a raised bank and overlooked the main A59 in Ormskirk. I was given my own room over the front door and I could look out over the road and fields towards the Devils wall. This was where Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have placed cannons in the civil war to bombard Lathom house. I loved staying with Nana because she spoiled me. The house always smelt of baking and good cooking. She had lots of homemade cakes in large biscuit tins in the kitchen.
I remember washing days with the copper being lit and the dolly tub and dolly pegs coming out. The dolly tub was corrugated steel drum shaped like a barrel and the dolly pegs was like a wooden stool with a tall handle with a tee piece at the top. The clothes were first boiled in the dolly tub and then the pegs were put in the tub and they were twisted with the tee handle.Soap was added by grating a big solid block of soap over the tub. A bit of dolly blue was added to the whites to make them really white and bright. Back and forth the pegs were turned to make all the dirt come out of the clothes. They were then lifted out and put through a mangle, it had two great big rubber rollers and it squeezed most of the water out of the washing. Nana had lots of washing lines strung up and down the garden where she hung all the clothes out to dry with wooden clothes pegs. I had great fun building models by sticking all the pegs together. I would make planes with them by crossing two together or two could be joined to make a six shooter. It took all day to do two or three loads of washing and Nana was really tired on washing day.
Grand dad was very good with his hands, he had a shed and a green house at the bottom of the garden where he did maintenance on his motorbike and grew tomatoes. I loved the smell of the tomato plants in the greenhouse. Even today it reminds me of a hot summer. Grand dad had cleared a bit of land in the cutting in front of the house and used it to grow vegetables. He had a compost heap where a hedge hog went looking for big juicy worms. In the spring he would break it down and spread it out to feed all the ground for his new planting, the local wild birds would come down and pick out all the worms and insects to feed all the newly hatched chicks. I remember one cheeky robin would come and sit on the spade handle when Grand dad had a mug of tea. He waited until we had moved and picked all the crumbs we had left from our butties.
Grand dad worked at the brassy, Hattersleys Brass foundry , they made all sorts of large brass pipe fittings for engineering factories. He traveled every day on his triumph tiger cub motor bike. He had to do all his own maintenance and this was done in his shed. It was like Aladin’s cave to me with all sorts of tins, jars and cans of all sorts of bits stored because “ you never know when you might need it”. This was an attitude that seems to run all through my life and I still have in some way today. Also the make do and mend instead of throw away and buy new the everybody has now a days.
He could fix almost anything with a bit of wire and a pair of pliers. I remember him soldering something and saying if he had taken it to the shop it would have cost 7/6d to fix, he had done it for nothing. He never called a plumber if any pipes burst, Great big bars of lead solder were melted over the gas burner and he sweated the pipes to repair them. He had all sorts of carpentry tools and made everything for the garden, like all his seed trays for the spring. Flower boxes for the back garden were made and planted with home grown geraniums. The house had a big glass display case where the best china was kept and on the window ledge at the top of the stairs was a big pot dog. It looked like a spaniel and was white with black spots and a gold chain round it’s neck.
At the back of the house was the wooden sun room that grand dad had built it was really warm in here first thing in the morning because it go the morning sun. We ate our meals in the sun room, the table would be folded away between meals to make more room. We hardly ever used the front room, that was always kept spic and span with everything dusted and shiny. This was so Nana could take any visitors in there without having to worry about cleaning first. There was table in the middle of the room which either had a clean white table cloth on it or an embroidered doily. There was also a big suite of a couch and two arm chairs with a big pattern brocade cover on it.
I did not know why I was I was living with them until one day in September I was taken home to Burscough and introduced to my new twin brothers David and Colin. Mum had had a home confinement and the twins were born on 11th September 1957. David was the oldest by 10 minutes, a fact he was very proud of when he was a bit older.
They had a new pram with a hood on both ends and they could go for walks with me walking along side my Mum as she pushed the pram. Everybody wanted to see the new babies and it took forever stopping and starting as we walked the mile to the village. To get into the village we had to go over the canal bridge, it was a high bridge or so it seemed to me. Mum parked the twins outside the cobblers halfway down the bridge, I don’t remember how but the brake came off and the pram started to roll down towards the village. Luckily someone coming up the bridge grabbed the pram and stopped it before it went too far. I really got a telling off but I honestly don’t remember undoing the brake.
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