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It rained all day the day we moved. We took the bedding wrapped up in the carpets on the first barrowload. I lit the fire and left the bedding airing in front of it while we moved the rest of the stuff. Herbert and I were soaked to the skin.
Around lunchtime there was a knock at the front door: when I answered it there was this white-haired old lady from the downstairs flat with a pot of tea and some delicious bread buns, fresh from the oven. Very welcome it was, and I thought how fortunate we were to have such a sweet, kind, thoughtful neighbour. We got the rest of the furniture moved and arranged round the house.
Kit came from work to mum’s house where we had a meal, then we walked back up to Morley Street pushing the pram with our babies. It was nice having plenty of space again. It was a four room flat, so I put the babies in the little front bedroom next to ours. We didn’t have enough furniture for the other room so I just used it to air clothes in or to dry them on wet days.
It was very handy living in Morley Street, we were just five minutes walk away from the main shopping area of Shields Road, with its choice of shops and three or four large department stores. I often went there to do my shopping or just to take the babies for a walk. On Saturdays after tea, Kit and I pushing the babies in the pram would walk on to Shields Road, down one side and up the other doing a bit of shopping on the way. Everybody was out and Shields Road was thronged with people all doing their shopping. We met all the people we knew on these jaunts, stopping to chat with first on, then another, looking at the shops, walking through Woolworths, nothing over 6d in Woolworths then.
Sometimes we walked over to the town, went through the Grainger Market, down the Bigg Market, up Northumberland Street. All the shops were open till 9 or so, and dozens, no hundreds of people out and about. It was a friendly communal atmosphere. Nowadays there’s none of that. The shops are closed and the streets of Newcastle dead, there’s no friendly atmosphere any more.
We would invite our friends to tea or supper on Sundays, or they would invite us, and we would sit and talk and laugh together. Pleasant evenings spent together, no television. Nowadays nobody seems to want to visit or have visitors; they might miss a TV soap opera if they do. There they are, all in their own box of a room staring at another box in the corner. They won’t even turn it off if you do go to visit some of them, their eyes never leave it, they’re not listening to you, all their attention is on the box, so what’s the use of visiting them, you might as well stay in your own home to watch TV.
We had only been in the flat two or three weeks when the old lady downstairs began her antics. I had noticed she seemed a bit odd. For instance, she used to come out every morning and dust the bush which grew in the pocket handkerchief sized front garden she had. She also had an old kitchen table in her back yard upon which she would spread out all the items she had bought on her shopping expeditions. Also all the things she had baked. I wondered why she did this, and then it dawned on me she was just letting me see what she had, a form of boasting and trying to impress the neighbours.
Harmless enough I thought, but then she started knocking up every time we moved. Betty was just a toddler and when in the house wore slippers. Sylvia still a baby crawling on the floor. I had them out almost every afternoon and they were in bed by seven at night, not noisy children by any means. The way that old woman went on. She thumped on the ceiling at every step we took, stumped about as if she was wearing clogs, slammed doors, rattled two enamel dishes together, making a fearful din. All this if Betty walked across the floor. 
If I dropped anything such as a knife or scissors, she went mad, shouting and screaming at me to stop the noise. She didn’t seem to understand that she was making more noise than a regiment of soldiers would make. She would wait till the babies were in bed and then go and slam her door in the passage several times. The door was right underneath their bed and the racket she made with it would wake them up in terror.
Unfortunately, no more of this autobiography was written. Bette and Kit Emmett went on to have six more children, ten grandchildren and there are currently around ten great grandchildren... and counting!
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