3 BELFORD TERRACE, WALKER

being the third part of the autobiography of
Elizabeth Masterman (later Bette Emmett)

b. 12.04.1913   d.13.10.1998

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We all set to with a will, turning the garden over, digging and weeding, and Annie and I cracked old broken bricks up to make gravel for the path. My dad worked hard, planting the seeds and in the evenings he got out his tools, bought some wood and began to make items of furniture. He was a dressing table, a bed chair, a bookcase, etc. We made mats out of the old clothes, hooky mats and clippie mats. Mum still had some of her brass ornaments, her steel fender and tidy, so the hearth was nice and bright and homely. Not much except the beds in the bedrooms at first, but as time went on mam managed to get a bedroom suite on hire purchase, and with dad making bits of furniture it was soon furnished. The bedrooms were small, so they didn’t take much furnishing.

In the course of time and by hire purchase we got a sideboard and a seven piece leatherette suite for the living room, a second hand table, and after a few years a bureau bookcase. It was all good solid stuff, no rubbish for mam, and so our house was comfortable again. Dad grew all our vegetables and built a greenhouse in which he grew lots of tomatoes, a cucumber frame too, so we had plenty of salad stuff in the summers. He was a keen gardener and spent all his spare time in his garden and greenhouse. The front garden was full of flowers and made a bright show in summertime.

Annie, Harry and I went to Welbeck Road School now. Effie was left school and started work at Coxons in Newcastle. We still had to go to Sunday School and we still had to wear those awful straw hats and those cumbersome clothes, but there were still plenty of fields and waste ground for me to gallop about on, and we were quite near Walker Park too. I didn’t like school. I never did, but I always managed to get through the exams OK. The only subject I was bad at was arithmetic, I loathed and feared it and never did well at it, but my other subjects were all right. I was good at essays and spelling and dictation, and managed to scrape through geography and history. I was alright at games and played netball and got through at gym and dancing. We didn’t get swimming which was a pity, I would have liked that and mam would not let us go to the baths.

When I was 11 or 12 years old, we had to go to cookery lessons and housewifery, as it was called. This is where I spent some of my most miserable hours. The teacher was Miss Ainsley and for some reason she took a violent dislike to me and I to her. I caused me a great deal of distress, holding me up to ridicule in front of the class, sneering at me, and on one occasion which I will never forget, when I had done something wrong, making me go to every class room in the school, stand there and tell everybody I had cleaned the silver with the wrong stuff. I suffered torments and would cheerfully have died to get out of it. I would not cry though, I couldn’t give her the pleasure of seeing me cry. The iron entered my soul and I became a hard and intractable child for that particular teacher. She had no joy of me after that, I made her life unbearable. I did nothing right and all her shouting and ranting had no effect on me. She must have thought I was stupid and gave up trying to teach me and would look at me and sneer when I showed up in her class. She hated me and I had to put up with her once a week from then until I left school. Good job it was only once a week we met – neither she or I could have stood it every day. As it was I spent most of the lesson outside in the passage, standing in the corner and on one lovely day, when I was standing there in disgrace, she came out of the classroom to see if I was still there, and stepped right into a heap of cement some workmen had put there. Oh fabulous joy! She went purple with rage and would have danced in temper, only she couldn’t, her feet were covered up over the ankles in cement. How I laughed! She was fit to kill me.

Apart from her, the teachers were all right. I loved our music teacher. She had a real flair for teaching. She was gentle and kind and soft-spoken and loved her music. She taught us all sort of beautiful songs, lots of them I still remember. Miss Gibson, I will remember you! From you I learned to love music and to appreciate it. You made all the bad time with Ainsley worth while.

When he was about five, my brother Michael went down with diphtheria and he was in Walkergate Isolation Hospital for a month or so. Diphtheria was a killer then, and my mother was frantic with anxiety. We were not allowed into the ward on visiting days, and had to stand outside and look through the window at him. He had been a difficult baby to rear and mum went through a bad time while he was in hospital. He recovered though, and things settled down again for a short while. Work, though, was becoming increasingly difficult to find, and strikes, lockouts too were becoming more frequent.

In 1926 there was the General Strike, when the whole country came to a standstill. Students volunteered to run essential trains and lorries for food distribution, but the strikers didn’t like this and called them “blacklegs”. Mother’s attacks of asthma were more frequent and I was often kept from school to help in the house. I learned to bake a stone of bread at an early age and also to do a large washing, scrub floors, clean windows. I was a very strong girl, sturdy and muscular so the hard work didn’t bother me, in fact I enjoyed it. My father’s health was also giving mum cause for concern and one day he came from work in the middle of the day. Again he had a haemorrhage, his ulcer had burst and he was in hospital for six weeks or so. Money was scarce again, you didn’t get much “sick money” in those days. When he recovered and was ready to go back to work there was no work in the shipyard, so he was on the dole and they didn’t get much money on the dole either. Somehow we survived though.

My father was always cheery and would tease and coax mum when she was in a bad mood, and though worry was constantly with them they tried hard to keep it away from the rest of us. Annie left school and got a job with Walter Cox, so there was a few more bob coming in. She got about 10/- a week, and Effie was earning about 15/- a week, so it helped. Keeping Harry and me in boots and clothes was a hard job. We were both active harum-scarum children, always up to something or other, and our clothes suffered accordingly. Dad used to cobble our boots himself when we were kids. People had to learn to do all kind of jobs themselves to save coppers.

After several months on the dole dad got started in the shipyard again. About this time a wonderful thing called wireless was being talked about and we acquired a small crystal set. We would sit with the headphones on listening in wonder to a voice saying “2LO Calling!” and dance music coming from the Savoy Orchestra in London. Dad became absolutely fascinated with wireless and began to build sets himself. The sets got bigger and had loudspeakers so he built them and the house was full of valves and transformers and other odd-looking things. A popular song at that time was “Valencia” and every time you switched on you heard it. Dad was always fiddling on with the knobs to get better reception or another station, so the programmes were interrupted by howls and squeals till mum would protest, “Leave the damn thing alone and let people listen to it in peace,” she would say. He couldn’t though, after a few minutes his fingers would itch to be at the knobs again and another batch of howls and squeals would assail our ears. I think he enjoyed building them and fiddling on with them more than he enjoyed listening.

In the course of time I left school. Work was scarce so it was several months before I found a job. I was good at sewing and embroidery. The last six months at school I had spent embroidering nightdresses, pillowcases, table clothes etc., for the headmistress. I had been in the top class for eighteen months so I had been doing the same lessons over and over again. I had never sat the 11-plus exam. Only children whose birthdays fell in certain months took that, so that one year I was too young and the next year I was too old. When I think of all those garments I sewed and embroidered during my last six months at school (I did no other school work) and on the day I left the headmistress gave me sixpence for doing it all! Six months of eye-straining work for sixpence! Mum was furious and rightly so. However, I got a good reference with special mention about my needlework ability, and mum thought I would get a job as dressmaker or something of that sort. None of the dressmakers wanted apprentices at that time though, so I was out of luck.

She would not let me get a job in the factories. I could have started in the toffee works, several of my schoolmates were working at Cremona Toffee Works, but no, mum said it was too rough. I had to have a more ladylike job. Effie was in an office, Annie in a shop, so I had to be the same. I suppose mum was thinking of her own hard life working in Arroll’s Brewery, bottle washing, when she was young, and wanted something better for us. Anyway, I eventually got a job. I thought I would be making hats, as they advertised for millinery apprentices, but when I started, I found it was selling hats. It was at Stell’s on Northumberland Street, where Marks and Spencers is now. The wage was 3/6d a week, and for that we worked from 9 in the morning till 7 at night, Friday nights it was 8 o’clock and Saturdays 9 o’clock at night. In the mornings I had to put the hats out, arranging them as artistically as possible on the stands, help to dress the window, and be general dogsbody to everybody else.

I graduated to selling hats as I got more experienced. As I had hated hats all my life and never wore them if I could avoid it, I could not be expected to like my job, but I got on all right with the other girls. There were several girls of my own age, working as apprentices in other departments of the store, and we got along fine together. An apprentice is a person who is supposed to be learning a trade, and consequently gets paid very little while learning. I don’t know what we were supposed to be learning, we were just shop assistants, but it was how the shopkeepers got young girls to work for practically nothing. When you got a bit older and naturally expected more money, they sacked you and got a fresh batch of “apprentices” to do the work. Slave labour, it was. We had to punch the time cards when we arrived in the morning, and every time we left the showroom for lunch or tea or if we just wanted to go to the toilet, and woe betide anyone who was late coming back. Nobody complained if we were late getting away at night, of course, and we frequently were late getting away as we were not allowed to dismantle the stands or put the hats away until the shop was

Every hat had to be put carefully away in the drawers and covered with tissue paper every night, and it took a good half-hour to do it, so it was 7 every night when we finally left. The shop closed at 6.30, 7.30 Fridays, and 8.30 Saturdays. The centre of Newcastle was a busy place till late at night in those days. The shops all had the same hours as us, and on Saturday nights the Grainger Market and the Bigg Market were still open when we finished. The streets were crowded and we girls would have a walk round, eyeing the lads and down the Bigg Market to buy an ice-cream, a great thick ice-cream sandwich they gave you for a penny, then catch the tram home.

I had a sweetheart at this time. He lived opposite us and we stood at our windows and stared soulfully across at each other. “The Waters of Tyne” was a favourite song of mine … “I cannot get to my love if I would dee The waters of Tyne run between him and me ..” I would hum this under my breath and imagine Belford Terrace was the waters of Tyne and I was dying of love, then my mother would see him at his window and would guess I was standing at our bedroom window and bellow up the stairs, “Get away from that window, you stupid fool!” so my romantic dream would be shattered. We did manage to meet though, round the corner, and go for long walks together on Sunday nights when I was supposed to be at Chapel. Once or twice we went to the pictures on Wednesdays. He was going to night school, and I slipped up to meet him coming out, and we would walk home together holding hands and staring at each other. It was all very sweet and romantic and harmless, no thought of jumping into bed or anything. My parents though put a stop to it. They thought I was much too young for love affairs. I was fifteen, he seventeen, so my dad warned him off. I died of a broken heart, he got another girl friend, joined the Army or something, and I never saw him again.

I was always interested in boys. I preferred playing with boys when I was small and as I grew up I always had plenty of boys interested in me. We girls from Stell’s used to go roller-skating quite often. There was a rink in Northumberland Road, and it was there I met my next boyfriend. He was a medical student at the University and a good bit older than I was. We went about together for several months, to the skating-rink, a few occasions he took me to Brough Park to watch the motor-bike racing, but mostly for long walks. This time I was much enamoured with the Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám and we would sing the verses to each other as we walked through the fields under the stairs. When the term was finished he went home to the Midlands somewhere. He was finished his studies and was now a doctor. I saw him off at the Central Station, he gave me a lovely little copy of the Rubáiyát and that was the end of that romance.

I got the sack from Stell’s about this time, as I was now sixteen and they wouldn’t pay more money. All the girls who were there were sacked, the “apprentices” I mean, so now I was out of work. I had to sign on the dole. I had to attend the dole school three mornings a week. The school was held in the basement of a church that used to stand at the corner of Sandyford Road and Grantham Road, and we just did sums and stuff like we did at school. Useless it was, they didn’t teach us anything worthwhile or train us for anything. It was just to make sure we were really out of work and not robbing the tax-payers of our 5/- a week. The rest of the week was spent doing the housework and fighting with my mother. She was having a bad time again, as dad was out of work too. It was hard on the women of those days, having to be constantly worried about where the next meal was coming from and how the rent was going to be paid. They didn’t have time to think about hair-do's or make-up or where they would spend their holidays or what clothes were fashionable like they do now. All they had was a few shillings a week and all their time and energy was spent on worrying hot to make it spin out.

The fights with mum were usually about where I had been. When we were at the dole school, we would be sent for interviews for any jobs that came into the Youth Employment Bureau. Several of us would be sent after the job, and as we had no money we had to walk to wherever the job was, and then walk back to the Bureau to hand in the cards and then walk all the way home, and it is quite a long walk from the middle of Newcastle to Walker. It used to take us two or three hours to walk to the jobs and back again, and of course I would be late getting home. If I hadn’t been sent after a job I would be back home from the school around 12.30, but it was frequently 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon before I got home, tired out after all the walking round Newcastle looking for jobs.

My mother never could understand the working of the dole and she used to think I had been up to no good when I was late. She would never believe me, and then we would have a slanging match. I was a cheeky devil, and always ready with back answers and so my mother got infuriated with me and would fetch me a wallop. She used to say I would have the last word if I had to be hung for it. Dad would try to pour oil on troubled waters, he believed me, he had experience of the dole and knew what it was like to be at the mercy of the bureaucrats, but mum would turn on him too for sticking up for me and all hell would be let loose. Mum and I would sulk at each other for a day or two, and then it would be forgotten until the next time.

I also got into much trouble for staying out late. We were expected to be in by 10 pm at the latest, and it was often 10.30 when I turned up, so once again we would go at it hammer and tongs. Effie and Anne didn’t get into these sort of rows. They were quieter, better-behaved girls than I was, and mum had no trouble with them. They spent nearly every evening at the chapel, choir practice, Christian Endeavour, Girls’ Club etc., always something on at the chapel, whereas I wanted to go swimming, roller-skating or just walking with my current boy-friend. She thought I should be like my sisters and I just couldn’t be.

We had fights about my clothes too. The fashions in the late twenties did not suit me, they were designed for very slim boyish figures, which both my sisters had. I was about 36-26-38 at that time and I looked awful in them. Breasts and hips were things to be flattened out, so I had to wear brassières that were straight across the chest, not shaped into cups like they are now, and heavy corsets laced up the back and bristling with steels to keep you rigid. How I hated these things! When you sat down in them you felt as if your breasts were being cut off and the steels cut into your thighs. I was permanently bruised across thighs and under the breasts with them. I had to wear them though, whether I liked it or not. Mum thought it indecent if your breasts looked like breasts and we were expected to do as we were told. I grew up being ashamed of my figure.

Also shoes were a bone of contention between mum and I. The fashion for shoes was pointed toes, and as I had square toed feet they crippled me. I suffered a great deal from blisters too. So whenever we had to get new clothes there were terrible rows between us. Whatever Anne got I had to have the same in a different colour whether it suited me or not, and of course I objected. Nobody seemed to understand how uncomfortable I was. Effie and Anne didn’t have to wear those awful corsets and brassières – they were slim enough to wear a soft corselet, and everybody thought I was just being bloody-minded and difficult.

I also felt guilty about being out of work. I got 5/9d a week from the dole, and I had a healthy appetite so was eating more than I was paying for. I worked hard in the house though, doing all the washing, floor scrubbing etc., so I reckon I should have been earning my keep. I didn’t get any pocket money though, or tramfares to go to the dole – I had to walk. I got 2d or 3d sometimes from the neighbours for doing odd bits of shopping for them when I was in Newcastle, and the woman next door would give me 6d occasionally for setting her hair. I saved these coppers until I had enough to go roller-skating or to the baths or pictures. If I had a boyfriend he would pay for me. That was another battle I had with mum, the baths. I was determined to go with the girls from Stells, so saved all my coppers till I had enough for a swimming costume. It cost 1/11½d and the cap 6d, not much, but it took quite a while to save it up. When I had bought it and told mum I was going to the baths there was a fearful row. She thought it indecent, but I stuck to my guns and went. She got used to it in time. She also got used to me using make-up. She didn’t like it, but got used to it. We could buy a small box of face powder for 2d -“Fulnana” they called it, a box of vanishing cream for 2d, and a 6d lipstick from Woolworths. To hear mum on about it you would think I was the Scarlet Woman herself. “Only streetwalkers used that muck!” she’d say. Fortunately, it cost nothing for my hair, it was naturally wavy and all it needed was setting into waves when damp. I wore hats as little as possible, but we were still expected to wear them when dressed in our best on Sundays.

We were not allowed to have Valentino hats, which were all the rage when I was about fourteen. These were flat-crowned Spanish hats with a rose tucked under the wide brim. Russian boots, too, were in fashion, and very short skirts, but we didn’t have them. We were always very correct and proper in our mode of dress, no fancy styles allowed. We got good quality clothes, decent and respectable and hard-wearing, but nothing outrageous in style. Effie and I didn’t, but as Anne grew up (incidentally she had changed her name from Annie to Anne about this time) she began to dress herself in more startling style. She was always romantically inclined, and lived in a dream world all her own. She loved dressing up and play-acting. She was practical enough in her work, she worked long hard hours for the pittance Walter Cox paid her, but in the house she was not practical at all.

On Sunday mornings, Effie and I used to do the tidying up, while mum cooked the dinner, but Anne took a bath and wandered about the house half dressed all morning, doing her hair and deciding what to wear. She would see some outfit at the pictures and come home and make it up for herself, no matter whether it was practical or not, Anne would wear it. If people stared at her in the street, well, what odds, she enjoyed that. Effie was much more practical in her outlook and always neat and tidy. They were slim and always looked smart and tidy, while I was a big, well-built girl who was never tidy in her life. I don’t suppose Anne ever noticed the rows I used to have with my mum but Effie did and used to stick up for me and plead with me not to be so stubborn and self-willed, she was the peace-maker. She would never let anyone say I was fat either, she would say, “no, she’s not fat, she’s just well built.” And then she would tell me I had lovely hair and a beautiful complexion and nice legs and so restore some of my wounded feelings.

I never did get a regular job. I got temporary jobs as a shop assistant at various places, helping out at the busy seasons like Easter and Christmas and holiday times, and I worked for a while on Fridays and Saturdays at Woolworths. I think we got 7/6d for working the two days but of course it was kept off our dole money. I mean two days’ dole money was kept off us.

By this time I was seventeen and qualified for the adult dole, so no longer had to go to the dole school. Single women on the dole got the sum of 10/9d a week; working Fridays and Saturdays they kept 3/6d off my dole, so I worked those two days for 4/- really. It was usually 9 o’clock on the Fridays and 10 o’clock on the Saturdaysbefore we were finished, and we started at 8.30 am. All our counters had to be restocked fully and the floors swept before we left at night. Our handbags had to be handed in to the office in the morning, they stayed there all day, and if you needed anything out of them you had to go and ask permission. When you collected your handbag at night, you had to open it and let the manager make sure you had none of the stock in it. If you made any mistake on your cash register it was instant dismissal. Chewing a sweet or chatting to a friend could also get you the sack. It was like being in prison. Thank heaven things have changed and nobody had to put up with the conditions which we worked under. They treated you like criminals at the Labour Exchange too. They would send a card to you, telling you to report at 10 o’clock on Tuesday, you would go hoping they had a job for you, they would keep you there along with dozens of other girls. It might be 2 o’clock in the afternoon before it was your turn to be interviewed, they would ask your name and address, and that was it. We signed on at the dole Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so these cards would be sent out for interview on Tuesdays and Thursdays just to make sure you were not cheating and were really out of work. It made life very hard for me, because as I said, mum didn’t believe it.

I was very unhappy in these years and refused to let anybody see I was unhappy, so built a hard shell around myself and my family thought I was a very tough nut indeed. The funny thing about it was, although my mum and I had these terrible rows, she would confide all her troubles to me and talk over the money problems with me and let me see her distress and anxiety, things she would not let the others know about. Maybe we were too much alike to live together in peace, we were the best of friends apart. Many times I felt like running away from home, but where would I go? No job, no money, who else but my family would have me, and I loved them all too much, anyway.

Things got a bit better when dad started work again. There was a ship to be built, which meant a couple years’ work for him. He was a plater and earned a good wage, so the tensions were eased a bit. I think on the whole mum preferred me out of work, as I was a good help in the house, and her asthma caused her a great deal of distress. Good wages coming in she didn’t have the grinding worry, so her nerves and temper were so much better, and we didn’t have so many fights.

So on the strength of better conditions, mum decided that she would buy a piano on hire purchase, something she had wanted for a long time. Off they went, she and dad one Saturday and spent the afternoon choosing one. It was delivered a few days later and we were all delighted with it. Mum decided my brother Michael would go for lessons, which he did for a few weeks, but his teacher rapped him over the knuckles with a ruler one day, so he packed it in. I decided that I would teach myself to play and I did. I spent many happy hours at that piano and was soon able to read the music and play a few tunes. It gave me something to do, something to concentrate on. I was happier having it, it eased the tension in me and I wasn’t so bad-tempered.

I used to go out a couple of times a week with a girl I’d met at the dole, Peggy. She lived a short distance away from us, and we met on Wednesdays and Sundays and went for walks “up the Benton”. This was a regular parade on those evenings where all the lads and lasses used to go. Up past Walkergate Hospital, on over the Coast Road, and you were in a tree-lined walk. The girls eyed the lads and the lads eyed the girls, they would chat to us a bit, and if we liked what we saw we might condescend to let them walk us home. If we didn’t like them they’d get the brush off and we’d walk on till we met someone we did like the look of.

Peggy and I made lots of boyfriends this way and we would go for walks or to the pictures with them for a week or two, or a month or two until we fancied a change. Then one evening in the autumn when I was eighteen years old, we met a couple of characters called Kit and Fred. They chatted us up and we went for a walk with them We met them the following Sundays, and it became the regular thing to meet them every Wednesday and Sunday. At first we went for walks in a foursome, sometimes to the pictures on Wednesdays and we had lots of fun and lots of laughs, Peggy and Fred, Kit and I.

This went on for a few months, then one evening Peggy and Fred wanted to go to a dance. Kit and I were not keen on dancing, we went to the pictures. This was the breakup of the foursome, thereafter we were pairs. Also Kit and I began to see each other more and more frequently, until we were meeting every night. We used to meet round the corner until dad found out I had a regular boyfriend, and he insisted that “my young man” should call at the house for me.

I was still on the dole sometimes, working a few weeks sometimes. Kit was in the same state. He was a painter and decorator, and work was scarce for him and a lot of other people too. This was 1931-1932. He would get work for a few weeks, the job would be finished, off work for a few weeks, another job for a few more weeks and so it went on. A heart-breaking time it was for thousands of other people besides us. The sole topic of conversation among women when they met in the shops buying their few scraps of groceries was work. “is your man working yet?” “No, is yours?” If some woman said, “Yes!” they would all want to know where. If it was at the shipyard or Parsons, or some big works, the women would rush home and tell their husbands. The husbands would dash off to wherever it was, the rumour of work would spread, and hundreds of men would turn up. Maybe one or two would be lucky enough to get started, the rest would troop dejectedly back home again. Dozens of men standing round every corner end waiting, waiting for a mere breath of a rumour of work.

My brother Harry joined the Merchant Navy and left home to attend their school at Gravesend. My father had his third haemorrhage just after I had met Kit. Again he was in hospital for about six weeks. He returned home but after three weeks he developed pneumonia and had to go back into hospital. Again money was scarce. Walter Cox gave me a job working with Anne for a few weeks to help out over the Christmas. After a few months off dad got well enough to go back to work and I had another spell out of work, then the dole people sent me for an interview for a job at the Post Office on Welbeck Road. On one side of the shop was drapery and I was to be the assistant on that counter. I got a shock when they told me the wage was 10/- a week. With 1/3d off for my insurance stamp, I was to receive the magnificent wage of 8/9d per week. I went back to the dole and protested that it was 2/- less than I was getting from them and that I would not have the job. They told me that my dole would be stopped at once if I didn’t take it, so I had to go and work for these slave-drivers. They knew that no matter how low the wage they offered, girls like me in my position would be forced to work for them or they got no dole-money. My mother said I had to take it, so I spent the next ten months at the beck and call of Mrs. Neyland. She used to get quite annoyed when I put my coat on promptly at 7 o’clock (8 o’clock Fridays, 9 o’clock Saturdays). She thought I should be content to work till ten or eleven at night, like her maid in the house did, but I wasn’t that daft.

She had an old, smelly, half-blind dog that used to wander all round the shop, cocking its leg up against the parcels of wool under the counter, and I was expected to change the paper on these parcels after it had soaked them. I protested of course, but she would not keep the dog out of the shop. One day it bit me when I was chasing it away from a parcel of wool. It nearly took my thumb off. My thumb turned black, and Mrs. Neyland gave me water and disinfectant to bathe it with. She was quite worried about it because a few people had complained about her dog snapping at them. I won my point though, because she kept the dog out of the shop after that.

They were unpleasant people who considered themselves “superior”, and anyone who worked for them should feel honoured to do so, they shouldn’t want paying for it and they shouldn’t want any time off. There were a lot of such people in those days. The clerks in the dole office were the same. They had jobs and they looked down their noses at anyone who was out of work and treated us like cattle.

Well, I worked there for a few months, ten months I think, and then we had a row. She gave me three jumpers to put in the window and told me they were 3/11½d each. I sold two in a short time and asked her what to put in the window to fill up the space. When she discovered I’d sold them at 3/11½d she went mad and said they should have been 5/11d. She stormed at me, saying she’d said 5/11d and I stormed back at her saying she’d said 3/11½d (and I still say she’d said 3/11½) but she couldn’t have made a mistake, oh no! It was my fault and she would keep the 4/- out of my wages. So I told her what to do with her job and she said she was going to sack me anyway.

That was the end, but the spiteful bitch told them at the dole that I’d given in my notice, whereas I had told them that she had sacked me, so I had to go in front of an enquiry board. I told them my story, they asked all sorts of questions about who paid for my face-powder, did I go to the pictures and who paid, how much did it cost to keep my hair waved, all sorts of personal questions, all because I was claiming 10/9d dole money!

In the end they decided to stop my dole for three weeks instead of the customary six weeks, which was what they did if you chucked your job up. So again I was in trouble with mum. Those weeks were hell. I was afraid to go home on a Friday with no dole. Kit offered to give me my dole money each week to save me the misery, but I would not accept it.

Effie was to be married at the beginning of August so there was plenty of housework to do, cleaning our house from top to bottom and also helping to clean and paper and paint the flat Effie and Harry had got at Willington Quay. The wedding day, August 5th, was very hot. The icing on the three-tier cake was soft in the heat, and mum was worried in case the top tier sank into the bottom one but all was well. Anne and I were bridesmaids and everything went off very well.

Life went on, my dole started and then I discovered I was pregnant. I was glad. I told Kit and we decided to get married, but first I had to tell my parents. He offered to tell them, but no, I would face the music myself, but I kept putting it off. I began to be very sick, not just morning sickness, but all-day sickness. I could keep nothing down, and of course mum guessed. I will not forget that day. All day long the battle raged, and when dad came in from work and had his tea, mum told him, and when Kit came for me that evening they started on him. He told them we were going to be married, and that was that.

We managed to find a flat, and spent the time papering and buying the few bits of things we started with. We got a cheap bedroom suite and dining room suite on hire-purchase, and a bedroom carpet. The whole lot came to about £30 and we paid 3/6d a week for it. It was an upstairs flat but we had no stair carpet, so I just scrubbed them and left them bare. Kit’s mother gave us a square of lino, and a small fireside rug, and that’s all we had.

My wedding day arrived. I was married in the dress I wore as bridesmaid at Effie’s wedding and a grey coat I had and a small black and grey hat. There was nobody at my wedding except my dad to give me away, Anne, who was my bridesmaid, and Kit’s friend for best man. We had no flowers and no photos. A few people came at tea-time, Kit’s mother and father, his cousin and wife, Effie and Harry and Peggy and Fred, and a couple of girls I’d worked with. When everybody went home, Kit and I went off to our flat.

No honeymoon for us, we couldn’t afford it. And so my life at Belford Terrace came to an end.

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