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I was born on the 12th of April 1913 in the bedroom above the shop which was situated in the middle of Copeland Terrace, Shieldfield, Newcastle upon Tyne, the third child of my parents, Henry Masterman and Mary Elizabeth Casey Masterman. 
Their first child, my sister Effie was 6 years older than I and their second child, also a girl was Francis Annie and two years older than I.
My mother often used to say that she was well off at the time of my birth, because the shop which was her business was a little gold-mine. She sold everything from a packet of pins to ice-cream and was opened as soon as she got out of bed in the mornings at six o’clock and closed when she went to bed which would frequently be midnight. Even then somebody would come knocking for something or other that they had forgotten to get. My earliest memories are of playing in and around the shop and living room at the back. In the shop window at the left side as you entered were sweets and chocolates and the counter at that side was stacked with bottles and boxes of confectionery, mostly of the kind of things that would appeal to children, like aniseed balls, sherbet dabs, Dolly mixtures, liquorice all sorts, everlasting toffee, hanky-panky, which was a kind of pink and yellow toffee, lucky potatoes, sweet tobacco which was shredded coconut covered in sugar and cocoa. The right hand window was full of small items of drapery, socks and hankies, ribbons, children’s pinafores, knickers, ladies’ black cotton stockings and all the haberdashery goods, pins, needles, elastic, darning wool, bobbins of thread and the like.
Anything you wanted, my mother sold it. She worked long hard hours and made good money in that shop. At the back of the shop she had cheese, butter, bacon, eggs. Under this counter were the big stone jars of jam, treacle, pickles, from which she would serve you two pennorth of whatever you required. The customers had to bring their own basins and the jam, treacle, etc. had to be spooned in and weighed. It took quite a while to serve customers as everything had to be weighed and wrapped, no convenient packets of goods then. Peas, beans, lentils, rice, tea, all had to be scooped out of drawers at the back of the counters, weighed and poured into paper bags, and we children soon learned to make stacks of paper cones out of newspaper ready for all these items.
I was just one year old when the First World War broke out and food was rationed which would add to my mother’s work no doubt. One thing though, we didn’t seem to suffer from the shortages, having a shop ensured our rations. We even had two girl lodgers who were working at Armstrong’s armament works. Looking back, I don’t know how my mother got through all the work because she did all her own cooking and cleaning, baking and washing too, and there were no washing machines or vacuum cleaners to help her, it all had to be done the hard way. She had lots of brass ornaments on the mantelpiece of the old fashioned iron range, steel fender and tidy on the hearth and they all required polishing. Friday morning was the time for blackleading the stove and polishing the brass, then the floor was scrubbed, the clippie mats shaken and rubbed over with a damp floorcloth to brighten them up a bit. A bonny sight it was too, when it was all finished, a bright fire burning, all the brass shining like gold, fender and tidy gleaming silver against the deep black of the range.
My father was a plater in Swan Hunter’s Neptune Yard at Walker. He hated the shop I think, mum used to say he would never help in it. She started the shop before I was born, as there was some talk of my father emigrating to Australia, and she needed to support herself and her children until such time as he got settled in a job and house out there and could send for her. However, gossip got back to my mother that THE MASTERMANS (dad’s family always referred to in capital letters) were saying he was leaving her and that they were in fact separating; so that put the tin hat on all thoughts of dad going to Australia. I must have been conceived about this time because I’ve always had this longing to go to Australia, as if Australia was my home. I wonder if it’s possible for a child to inherit its father’s dreams?
I loved my dad deeply and devotedly. I loved my mum too, but there was an understanding, deeper than love, with my father. I was a tomboy, a hoyden, who was never still and never ever tidy, my clothes in ribbons and the lace of my petticoats hanging in loops below my dress, frequently in trouble with mam, but dad would smile at me with a mischievous glint in his eyes and I knew he understood and all was well. I have an early memory of being carried in his arms, looking over his shoulder down his back and watching the heels of his boots going back and forth as he walked along the street. How old was I? I don’t know but I must have been very small to be carried. Another memory is of standing in the circle of his arms as he sat on the sofa in the living room at the back of the shop looking out of the window at the rain, both of us somewhat miserable because mam was ranting on at us about something or other, whether it was one of my misdeeds and he was comforting me, or one of his misdeeds and I comforting him I know not, just that we were allies.
I remember also trips across the river in the scullerboat to Hebburn to visit relations of my mother’s. The scullerboat was a small rowing boat and you climbed down steps like a ladder into it and were rowed across the Tyne for a penny. Sometimes we would go over the High Level Bridge in a horse drawn tram to Gateshead. We went to a wedding in Hebburn one day, and I was dressed in a black and white checked coat with black velvet collar. Effie and Annie had the same kind of outfits. I have distinct memories of riding in the horse-drawn cabs to the church and back to the house, a large plate of iced cakes with cherries on top and mother’s uncle doing a clog dance on a paving stone which he had brought into the house from the back lane. My mother Harry was born three years after me and I can remember going to his christening in a white dress.
Memories of the war years too; my sister Annie screaming in hysterics being carried back and forth in the street in mother’s arms to try to comfort her because one of our airships had passed overhead and some fool woman had thought it a German Zeppelin and had screamed out “The Germans are coming!” which promptly sent Annie into hysterics. We had a desk-bed in the living room and we were pushed into it whenever there was warning of an air raid. A desk bed was a piece of furniture like a large side-board and when the doors were opened a folding bed came out. We three children were bundled into it and the bed folded back as far as it would go, then the kitchen table pushed over the top of us to protect us. Another memory was of going to the Palace Theatre in the Haymarket with our Aunty Francis, eating oranges and nuts and seeing a lovely lady in a floaty sort of dress on the stage and having to come out before the end because there had been an air-raid warning. Dad had come to escort us home.
One day I was taken into Newcastle to see the soldiers marching down Grainger Street to the Central Station on their way to France. I was held up on somebody’s shoulder so that I could see over the people in front. Crowds lined the street, the soldiers marched past, then a deep moan went through the crowd as the girls came into view. They were the nurses also on their way to France. I can remember hearing somebody saying, “The bits o’ lasses are ganning as well,” and the tears rolling down people’s cheeks.
I have other snatches of memory, of trip to Newcastle, the Haymarket at night, cobble-stoned, drizzly rain, naphtha flares dancing on the stalls, the light from them gleaming on the wet stones, straw blowing in the wind, the raucous shouts of the stall holders, sound of steam organs on the roundabouts. A fair of some sort obviously. Going home this same occasion along Northumberland Road, my mother resting on a low stone wall looking through railings at lights in the windows, mam saying it was Wilkinson and Simpson’s laboratory. Was she expecting Harry at that time, was that why she had to rest?
We used to go to the park at Shieldfield, a small park just at the end of our street, Effie, Annie and me, and any cat I could find to take with me. 
The park-keeper was a little brown wrinkled old man, wearing button boots. I had a dolly pram and wrapped the cat in a bit of blanket and expected it to stay there for me to push around. Sometimes it did, sometimes not. Somebody gave me a bantam cock which I used to try and wrap up too. It used to curse and swear at me and make a fearful din. The end came when I put in on the turntable of our gramophone and the poor beast went whirling round and round shrieking then I was flung off and made for the window where it went frantic trying to get away. That did it, my bantam cock was banished. Also a snuff- coloured Pomeranian dog we had for a short while. It was a bad-tempered yappy beast and would let no one into the shop so that went as well. Then somebody gave me a toy horse. It was the size of a large dog mounted in wheels, made of real skin and must have been a rich child’s toy. However, when I got it its face was badly torn so my Granny patched it with a piece of flannel and put boot buttons for eyes. It was a fearsome looking thing but I loved it. I insisted on having it standing in the shop doorway with its head poking out. People were put off coming in when they saw this queer-looking beast and having recollections of the yappy Pom going for their ankles, trade fell away so the horse had to go too My mam gave it to the dustman when my back was turned and when I discovered it was gone I cried for days for my horse.
I was very ill with pneumonia when I was about three, and I can recall the doctor who came to visit me, dressed in a silk hat and black frockcoat, grey trousers, driving up to the door in his pony trap. I remember him because when I was getting better he lifted me in his arms and took me to the window to let me see his pony. I was absolutely horse mad when I was young. I spent hours trotting up and down the street with a piece of straw rope held in my hand behind my back for a tail (and it had to be a long tail), a long piece of string in my mouth, and sister Annie or brother Harry holding it behind me for reins. There I was, a fine prancing horse tossing my head, snorting, neighing, and lifting my hooves up high like the very best trotters. In the house I stood at the head of the couch with my reins over the curved arm, Harry sitting on the couch driving me and I would trot on the spot for as long as anyone would stand it. I must have been a pest, no wonder my mother’s temper was worn thin.
They tell me I swore dreadfully too, my first words being, “Light the bloody gas.” I was late in starting to talk surely, if they were my first words and I must have been listening and learning from my elders. Be that as it may, my mother told me frequently that they were my first words. I was a sturdy pretty child from all accounts, with fair curly hair, blue eyes and far skin. People used to urge my mother to put me into Bonny Baby competitions, but she never would. Maybe she was scared I would show her up by my untidy appearance and swearing.
My prettiness was only outward though, I was a devil within, screaming tantrums because my clothes were not comfortable, swearing, tearing my stockings and underwear, riding on the backs of horse-drawn wagons, and another of my favourite tricks which used to scare the living daylights out of my poor mother was to stand under the bellies of the great cart horses which pulled the delivery wagons. When they stopped at the door of the shop the driver would carry in the goods to be delivered and that was my chance, straight underneath the horse. I would wrap my arms round the great front legs and poke my head out between them, the horse would lower his nose to sniff my hair, blow softly through his nostrils and nibble at hair and cheeks with his soft velvety lips. I remember the feel of it distinctly. I loved it and I’m sure the horses loved it too. I never came to any harm but mother and the drivers were terrified the horse would lift one of those great hooves and smash me into the ground. I had no fear of animals and still have not.
A great day for me was when there was a funeral in the neighbourhood, for then the hearse and two or three carriages would arrive, each one drawn by two big coal black horses. What beautiful horses they were, with long tails and manes and polished hooves, no white on them at all, the harness with silver buckles and the carriages all shiny too. How I loved them but I never did get under one of them, because the coachmen had whips and never left their steeds and if I went too near they would flick the whip in my direction and chase me away.
My Granny (Mother’s mother) lived not far from us. She was a big woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s pinny with a black shawl round her shoulders. She did quilting and when anybody went into her house she was usually busy at the quilting frame and all visitors were expected to thread needles with long pieces of white thread. She had several needles stuck into the frame at her left hand and you threaded them and stuck them into the frame at her right hand ready for her to pick up and get on with her sewing. In her younger days she helped the Sisters of Mercy, tending the sick, delivering babies and laying out the dead. The nuns did the work that District Nurses do today, and Granny was their handy woman. She was a character and would help herself to my mum’s sheets, blankets, food out of the shop to take for her patients. Quite frequently mum never saw her sheets and blankets again and there used to be rows about this but Granny would just come round again and help herself when the need arose.
My father was a kind good-hearted man and could not bear the thought of anyone suffering. He would give the shirt off his back to anyone that admired it or if he thought they had greater need of it than he, and one thing that happened when I was three or four years old affected him deeply. I had a small playmate Ellen Gray a thin pretty child with curly brown hair. She came from a large poor family who lived opposite us on the corner of Canada Street and Copeland Terrace. These were terrible tenements, dark and rat-ridden. Ellen was in our house playing with me one night when dad came from work. Mum had for his tea a boiled egg, a luxury in those starving days of 1916-1918. Everybody was feeling the pinch of the war-time blockade and food was scarce. Eggs were sixpence each, but with mum having the shop, dad working in the shipyard and with two girl lodgers, we were better off than lots of other people. Anyway, there was dad sitting down to enjoy his egg after a hard day’s work, and Ellen Gray staring at him.
One fault Ellen had, her nose was always running. Dad took one look at the horrible green snot, hanging as usual from her nose and requested mum to send her home as the sight of it made him feel sick, especially when eating a boiled egg. So mam sent her home. Next day we learned Ellen had died during the night. She had eaten stale bread coated with rat poison someone had put down on the stairs of the tenement where she lived. When dad heard of it he cried bitterly and could never forgive himself for eating his egg while a hungry child went home to die. Never again in his life time would he turn anyone away from his door. Even when times got very hard for us he would give tea and something to eat to any beggar who came to our door. And there were plenty of beggars in the days between the wars. Some of them so filthy that mam would not let them in the house. He would sit with them in the yard listening to all their troubles while they ate the bread and butter, biscuits or whatever mum had. When they had gone, well fed, she broke the dishes they had used in case of infection to us. She used to say it cost her plenty to feed dad’s lame dogs and also her mother’s patients. He never forgot Ellen Gray and neither have I. Mum took me to see her laid out in her coffin, it must have been the first sight of death I had and I never forgot her. I didn’t know the manner of her death till years later. I was too young to understand at the time. The grief went deep with my parents and we were brought up never, ever to turn anyone from our door.
The tenements of Shieldfield were terrible places. Our side of Copeland Terrace wasn’t too bad, we had three bedrooms and a sitting room upstairs and the living room and scullery behind the shop. The rest of the houses on our side were terraced flats, each with their own back-yard. The tenements across the road were awful, back-to-back, crowded together, only one or two rooms at the most to each family, one lavatory and one tap in the back entry to serve maybe six or eight families. Archways ran through the middle of the blocks and stairways ran up from under the arches to the upper rooms. Black as pitch it was on those stairways, too.
Living as they did in those conditions, everyone knew everybody else’s business but they were kindly people and helped each other in their troubles. They wouldn’t stand for any funny business though. If they found out anyone was carrying on with somebody else’s husband or wife, all the wives would get together and taking their tin pans, dishes, wooden spoons, and anything that they could clash together to make a row they would march to the offending home and drum them out. My mother used to tell me about this when I grew up. I don’t remember it myself. She said the noise they made was terrific and the family or person who had offended the neighbourhood usually moved away. I do recall seeing fights though. Two women would have a quarrel about something or other and they would have a slanging match, hurling insults at each other. When this happened, the bairns would run along the street, telling all the other bairns there was a fight on, and where it was at. Off we would all gallop to see the excitement.
The women by this time would have run out of insults and have started in to punch each other and roll on the ground, pulling and tugging at each other’s hair and clothes. We kids loved this part of it and danced around egging them on, “Go on missus, punch her in the eye.” We didn’t take sides or anything like that, just egged each of them in turn. My mum didn’t like me to be at these scenes and if she heard there was a fight she’d grab me and put me in the back yard, but if I heard of it first I was off and away and she’d have to send someone to bring me back. The fights always ended when some man would come up and kick the contestants apart, haul them to their feet, box their ears and send them, tearful and ragged, on their way.
I spent quite a bit of my time standing in the dark passage crying. Mum’s patience would be exhausted with my tantrums or naughtiness, I would get a smacking and be banished to the passage till I behaved myself. One thing I was always in trouble for was my clothes. I hated my clothes, they were never comfortable and I writhed and twisted when I was dressed in the mornings and mum would take them off and put them on two or three times to try to make them more comfortable. It never occurred to her to dress me in lighter, less restricting garments. They were truly terrible, the clothes we had to wear. First there was a horrible garment called combinations, or “combs” for short. This was a one-piece affair that buttoned up the front from crotch to neck, the legs came almost to my knees and the sleeves to my elbows. It was made of fine wool and it itched. Next came a chemise, a cotton garment tied round the neck with a tape drawstring. Next came my knickers, or bloomers, white cotton with lace round the legs, buttoned at waist, then two petticoats, one of flannel and one of white lawn, lace round the hems, both with drawstrings at neck and waist. A thick dark dress usually of strong drill or serge and on top of that a white lawn pinafore, lace trimmed, with another drawstring round the neck. So that in all there were four drawstrings round my neck and two or three round my waist. No wonder I was uncomfortable and irritable. Winter and summer, this was what we had to wear. I longed to get rid of them and was always hot and sweaty and pulling and tugging at them to try and make myself more comfortable. I think this is the reason for my life-long hatred of tight, heavy and restricting clothing.
In summer, the water cart came round the streets spraying water all over the road to wash the dirt away, and I would run behind it with the other children, letting the water spray over me. I envied the poorer children who had no heavy boots to wear and were in rags. They would be so much cooler than I was. I would get a smacking for getting my clothes wet and would have to stand in the passage again. I cannot remember Effie and Annie ever getting a like punishment but then they were more lady-like and did not give our mum so much trouble as I did.
I can remember being taken to Ponteland several times. Mum and Dad had some friends there. The husband was in charge of the level crossing gates and they lived in a house near them. We would stay with them for a few days and as the train went past the bottom of their garden, my Granny, who used to accompany us on some of these occasions, would open the train window and throw our bundle of clothes out into the garden. It saved having to carry it from the station. They grew honesty in their garden and that’s where I first saw it and heard its name. They had a rustic arbour, covered with roses and full of spiders. I climbed on the backs of sheep and pestered the cows so I was still in trouble. I couldn’t keep out of it nohow.
And so we come to the end of the First World War and we had a party in the street and everybody dancing and singing and a young woman dressed in a soldier’s uniform marched up and down. I remember hearing two old women calling it disgraceful for a woman to act like that. One of these old women would no doubt be out next-door neighbour who was the local gossip, what I now call a “3-D” gossip – Death, Disaster and Disease. My dad called her the “News of the World”. Of course being me, I told her this and she had a row with dad and mum about it and I got into trouble once more.
One day mum had to go into Newcastle to do some shopping. She got us all dressed ready to go. As she was going out she remembered her blankets needed airing. She had washed them the day before, so she went back into the house and put the clothes horse full of blankets round the fire. “I’ll have to wire in when I get back,” she said, which meant she would have to work hard to catch up on the chores when we returned. Locking the shop up during a working day was a rare occurrence for her, the shopping must have been urgent or she wouldn’t have done it. Off we went. We were walking along New Bridge Street when we saw the fire engine - the horses racing at full stretch, foam flying from their mouths, fire-bell clanging, brass-helmeted firemen clinging on for dear life. What an exciting sight that was. We stopped to watch it go by. Mum said, “I hope it’s not going to our place.” It was though!
We were in Grainger Street when mum’s step-brother caught up with us and told her the shop was on fire. Poor mum turned faint with shock and had to be taken into a shop to sit down and drink a glass of water. She soon recovered and off we went back home. What a mess when we got there. The shop was in a terrible state, bottles broken and sweets melted, all the food stuffs burned, everything charred and blistered. The living room at the back was gutted and all the furniture burned, but the firemen had got there in time to save the upstairs. A spark had jumped onto the blankets and that’s what had started the blaze. A pile of pound notes she had in her press was gone, burned with the press. She was not insured so she lost everything. She still had the bills to pay and now there was no shop to bring to money in.
We slept there that night but next day she had to pack up and get the furniture loaded onto a van and dad went off with it to his mother’s house in Walker. She had agreed to let us live with her till we got another home of our own. We children went with mum in the tramcar and I can remember the miserable journey it was. My mother was later to say that she lost her luck with that fire. Nothing was ever the same for her after that. We moved into the two attic rooms above Granny Masterman’s upstairs flat at 13 Parade Crescent. My father’s sister 
Emily Annie (she got “Manny” for short) lived in the downstairs flat, No. 11, and my mother’s piano could not be carried up the stairs it had to be put in Manny’s parlour. So there we all were crammed into two attic rooms, living with people who did not care for our mum and for whom she had no liking. Poor mum, her heart must have been broken. She had been so well off in the shop, plenty of money for all our needs, nice furniture and clothes, quite a few pretty little pieces of jewellery of her own, respected by everyone in Shieldfield. So much respected was she that when people in the neighbourhood had any differences among themselves they used to come to her for advice and to settle the disputes. She was fair and listened to both sides and then passed judgment. And it is to her credit that they would agree to abide by her decisions. No longer mistress in her own home, her life was going to be miserable over the next five years, for that’s how long we lived at 13 Parade Crescent.