Child from Home (7 page)

The bay mare crossed a shallow ford, or water-splash as we called them, beside which was a stone footbridge with white handrails. It nestled in the depths of a small valley and a little way past it a path led up to Kelton Banks Farm. ‘Mr Ward owns that farm,' Spaven told Miss Thorne. ‘They keep several Shire 'osses stabled there. They do various jobs on t'farm as well as pullin' t'snowplough, which is kept ready in case it's needed locally durin' t'winter.' The narrow, twisting road climbed a steep bank between tall, overgrown hedgerows before we turned right onto the Cawthorn–Cropton road. We travelled beside wild briar bushes that were heavily laden with blushing hips. ‘In t'winter months this road often gets blocked by deep snowdrifts,' said Spaven. As we got closer to Cropton the tightly packed conifers gave way to mixed woodland interspersed with ploughed fields and grassy meadows. We turned into the top end of Cropton village and on our right a narrow earthen track led up a grassy slope to the church gate. Behind it lay an old graveyard with its grassy hummocks and leaning headstones, clustered around the pretty parish church in which Mrs Stancliffe was a Sunday school teacher – as Mam had been at home.

We thoroughly enjoyed that lovely carriage drive of about eight miles through the sights and scents of the countryside. The leaves whispered in the gentle breeze with the odd one spiralling silently down; Miss Thorne called them ‘harbingers of autumn'. The trees seemed, to me, sad at their loss. Apples were ripening in the orchards and blackberries hung in red clusters in the hedgerows. Once in the small market town of Pickering we walked up the hill to the old stone building called The Vaults where Fred Pickering's barbershop was situated. We had our hair cut in the bobbed style of those days. The barber put an enamelled tin bowl on my head and cut up to it, and I vaguely recall the masculine scents of bay rum hair oil and shaving soap. I remember the click and snip-snip of the scissors as my fair locks tumbled to the floor, and as we came out the old, octagonal-shaped clock on the square, church tower struck four. We giggled when we were told that the top part of Potter Hill, facing east, was once called High Backside. We were taken to the Central Café above a tobacconist's shop and were treated to a lovely iced fairy cake with half a glazed cherry on it, and a glass of orange fizz. The long, fine sunny spell came to an end and October was very wet with heavy and persistent rain that rushed down the forest runnels to swell the waters of Sutherland Beck. The streams became engorged to overflowing as the seemingly endless rains drained down from the saturated uplands. As the appalling weather continued unabated, the once shallow beck became a deep, raging torrent that raced down the narrow valley to join the roiling waters of the River Seven, now in full spate on Glaisdale Moor. Lower down it became a man-deep torrent that angrily thundered, foamed and surged southwards threatening to sweep away the picturesque old footbridge at Nutholme. Further downstream the full, muddy river caused extensive flooding when it burst its banks in the low-lying areas.

On those cold, dark and dreary days the paraffin lamps were on all day, and the doors and windows were kept tightly shut as incessant rain lashed against and streamed down the windowpanes. The wind howled, rattling the tall sash window frames as it boomed and echoed in the wide, stone chimneys. The torrential rain saturated the land and clattered onto the portico roof making the glass sing before rushing down to flow along the old cast-iron guttering. It drip-dripped interminably from the trees and bounced high in the puddles, and the packed soil of the pathways became sodden and slowly turned to ooze.

Around that time two new twenty-year-olds, Catherine Todd and her friend Mary, joined the nursery staff. Ten years earlier, when Catherine was only ten, her mother had died in the family home at Berwick and she was sent with her younger sister to a children's home in Scarborough. After leaving school she worked as a housemaid in Leeds, then in the early 1930s she got a job as a housemaid at Queen Margaret's Girls' School for well-bred young ladies on Filey Road, Scarborough. It was a private school; a kind of finishing school for the well-off, where she became a close friend of another maid who came from Middlesbrough. Mary, a tall, slim, dark-haired girl, went home on holiday taking Catherine with her. The family was living on Cannon Street when war was declared and the pair went to a ‘keep fit' session at The Settlement Club where they heard that staff were urgently required. They applied and in early October were delighted to learn that they had obtained posts at Sutherland Lodge. Catherine was 5 feet 4 inches – quite tall for a young woman in those days – slim, fit and attractive with soft mousy hair (with a ‘kink' in it) that rested on her shoulders.

The two young women really loved children and, from the outset, Catherine used to sing us to sleep at night after tucking us in and giving us a hug and a kiss. These little gestures of affection were much appreciated by the children who, like me, were so far from home. She used to sing a song that began, ‘Little man you're crying, I know why you're blue', and went on to say, ‘Time to go to sleep now, little man you've had a busy day.' I learned later that the lyrics were from a song recorded by Kitty Masters – a popular and well-known singer of the time – who was a vocalist with Henry Hall's BBC Dance Orchestra. During the '30s the band, with its signature tune of
Here's to the Next Time,
was often heard on the wireless and we called Catherine ‘Kitty' from that time on.

We took to her and came to love her, and she returned our love a hundredfold. She was a sensible, capable and level-headed young woman who believed that children are precious and should be protected and loved if they are to become stable adults. When we had to stay indoors Kitty kept us entertained and happily occupied by playing music, singing and dancing for us, and her youthful exuberance ensured that we did not mope or brood about home too much. She kept us busy drawing and playing with toys and she devised guessing games that lifted our spirits and encouraged us to think for ourselves. When we were with her we scarcely noticed the rain that fell pitilessly day after dull, dismal day.

The cosy day-room was in the bothy on the floor above the tack room and in it we sat on tiny wooden chairs that were arranged in a circle around her. In times long past, the bothy was the place in which the unmarried farmhands used to sleep and eat, and to get to it we had to go up a narrow wooden staircase. A log fire burned in the grate of the open stone fireplace behind a wire-mesh fireguard, and on the green-painted wood panelling of the dividing wall there were brightly coloured pictures of children at play. A row of five elegant, mullioned windows faced north, and beyond the garage, the stables and the soggy meadow, the deep dark forest crowded round us in all directions.

Mary and Kitty read to us and we learned to chant ‘Incy Wincy Spider' and many other popular nursery rhymes. We sang children's songs like
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star; I Had a Little Nut Tree
and
Hickory, Dickory Dock,
and I particularly enjoyed singing ‘You push the damper in and you pull the damper out and the smoke goes up the chimlee [as we called a chimney] just the same' at the top of our voices. We made ‘atishoo' sounds and flopped down giggling when the music stopped. We played ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses', never realising that we were reenacting the sneezing that was a symptom of the bubonic plague that 300 years back had caused thousands of tragic and painful deaths.

At other times Kitty read us stories from
Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales
and
The Arabian Nights,
that told of wicked giants, flitting fairies, fearsome ogres, and fire-breathing dragons. There were men in turbans wearing slippers that curled up at the toes and huge genies that came out of oil lamps, and little children got lost in deep forests and were in danger of being eaten up by gnarled old witches. Our reactions to them told Kitty much about us and the tales helped us to learn right from wrong.

In the cosy warmth of the day-room I felt loved and secure, but some of the tales frightened and thrilled me at the same time. I would sit there wide-eyed, totally engrossed and enraptured by Kitty's lilting and mesmerising voice as her stories weaved their magic spell. From that time on – in my mind – I was able to transport myself into enchanted realms as she had given me the key that opened the door to hidden treasures.

The room across the landing contained several small camp beds, each with a feather-filled pillow and a straw-filled palliasse. There were white cotton sheets and warm woollen blankets on every bed and the row of tall, narrow windows were shuttered against the fury of the raging tempest. The regular routine of The Settlement Nursery School was continued here and we were kissed and tucked up in bed for a nap every day after our midday meal, which we ate at the tiny tables in the day-room. We always called it dinner and never lunch because we had been brought up to believe that only posh people called the midday meal lunch or luncheon. Every time we turned over in our little beds the hooked wire springs made a metallic, twanging sound and this, of course, encouraged us to try to outdo each other to see who could make the most noise until we got a telling off.

Sometimes, after Kitty had read scary stories to us, I could not get them out of my mind, and I was reluctant to be laid down. The low, dancing flame of the paraffin lamps threw out a soft light and had a distinctive smell, but the guttering candle threw grotesque, shifting shadows and, where they were deepest, I thought I saw horrible monsters and weird phantoms lurking, flitting and floating. Stifling my terrified whimpers I would curl up under the bedclothes and try to shut them out. Were they the product of an overactive mind or due to some trick created by the light and shade?

Upstairs in the main house, there was a spacious bathroom with a large white-enamelled bath enclosed within highly polished, wooden side panels, and in its capacious depths Kitty and Mary bathed us every night. Kitty always dipped her elbow in it to check that the water temperature was not too hot and one child was bathed while another was being dried. We were then put to bed, either in the large downstairs dormitory in the west wing of the house, or in a smaller room above the kitchen, in which Kitty slept. Here she was able to keep an eye on four children – usually those that required more care or supervision than the rest. I enjoyed the climb up the narrow, back staircase to that little bedroom, and I liked sleeping there, as I always felt more comfortable and secure with her around. The room had once been used as living quarters for the maids that worked in the grandeur of the old country house.

At bath times, Kitty and Mary had been told by Miss Thorne to examine our heads for lice and to check our bodies for signs of scabies. This happened more often after a puny little child arrived from a slum area of Middlesbrough where he had contracted scabies after sharing a bed with an infected person. He was showing the classic symptoms of the nasty and unsightly, contagious skin disease that was quite common in those days. It was caused by a female parasite, the itch mite. Skin eruptions occur in the webs of the fingers, on the wrists and buttocks and in the groin. The little boy was kept apart from us to prevent the disease spreading and was given hot baths in a small bathroom off the downstairs passageway. Kitty had to scrub his back and buttocks to lay open the lesions and we could hear him crying pitifully throughout this painful process. But she had to be cruel to be kind and, had it not been done, further complications could have arisen. A yellow emulsion was then very gently applied and the messy stuff covered a good part of the skinny boy's little body from the neck downwards. Her heart went out to him, but the disease was caught early enough to prevent impetigo and he soon recovered.

By Halloween the rains eased a little and were succeeded by thick clinging white mists that often lingered all day. The trees of my ‘enchanted forest' looked spooky in the dim, dreary light and the bushes became indistinct and assumed nebulous and ghostly shapes. The raw, chilly fogs that shrouded the damp and drearily dripping forest were known locally as ‘roaks'. Kitty and Rosemary entertained us with games using apples suspended on a string, which we tried to bite, or we played at apple bobbing where we tried to get one from a barrel of water using only our mouths. Kitty dressed us up as witches, ghouls, ghosts and vampires and made lanterns from hollowed-out turnips. It was scary in the darkness of the bothy with the lights out and we were glad when they lit the candles.

I felt sad on seeing the number of trees that had been brought down by the gales as I looked on the fallen giants as my friends. On the afternoon of 5 November the gardener built us a bonfire from tree cuttings and deadwood, and Mam told me that, ‘In the distant past bones were burned to ward off evil spirits, hence the name “bonfires”.'

We were only allowed to have a fire during the hours of daylight and the fallen softwood branches and twigs, known locally as ‘kids', spat and burned well due to the resin in them. Once the fire was well established we roasted jacket potatoes and the delicious, golden butter dripped down onto our chins and bibs. The fire had to be put out before dusk. We then sat in the semi-darkness of the bothy and watched wide-eyed as Kitty lit sparklers and a small box of indoor fireworks that were the Stancliffe family's leftovers from the previous year. Soon all fireworks were banned completely.

Kitty was well able to cope with most of our childish problems and small emergencies and she had an uncanny knack of knowing when things were troubling us. She started getting us up to go to the toilet during the night, thus greatly reducing the bed-wetting. The weak and pitiful little boy (the runt of his family) who had had scabies used to tremble and shake on being taken from his bed during the chilly nights and Kitty felt so sorry for him. She would often wrap a warm blanket round his thin little body and hug him close until he settled, and she lavished on him that little bit of extra love and attention that she knew we all so desperately needed.