The birth of our first son seemed to trigger an ability in me to produce males, for there followed a run of boys. Four years after Jim, I had another boy and after an interval of three years, yet another. I gave Tommy the job of finding names for each of them. He opted for the name of Sam for our third boy, for no other reason than he was born on 28 July, the feast day of St Samson.
‘The name denotes strength,’Tommy remarked, ‘and in this day and age that’s something a boy could do with, especially if he follows in my footsteps and becomes a market porter.’
Sam was a handsome baby with thick black hair but I wasn’t sure about the name Tommy had chosen. If it had been left to me, I’d have called this one Rip Van Winkle because he did nothing but sleep. To start with, he didn’t want to get himself born as he was three weeks late and had to be induced. Perhaps he knew something we didn’t. I think he was too comfortable in there and decided to have an extra lie-in. When' it came to feeding time, he simply fell asleep in the middle of the meal. His personality was clear from the beginning, for when he came to the crawling stage, he wasn’t too keen on going round on all fours in case he fell on his face. Instead he developed the skill of scooting around the kitchen floor on his backside
at breakneck speed by using his arms as oars. Perhaps one day I could enter him for the Boat Race. And his obsession with pans and baking tins convinced me that one day he would become, not a market porter as Tommy hoped, but a chef in one of the top hotels.
Tommy named the next boy Les after the famous Manchester composer, Leslie Stuart. Boys now outnumbered the girls three to two. But with five kids, I sometimes forgot all the names and young Les was often called, ‘Flo, Polly, Jim, Sam, I mean Les.’ This new baby was as different from Sam as it was possible to imagine. For a start, his hair was as ginger as Sam’s was dark, but more importantly he had a completely different personality. He arrived on the scene two weeks early as if he couldn’t wait to get on with the business of living. And as for feeding, where Sam had been utterly relaxed and dozed off, Les was tense and could finish a whole bottle in one minute flat and look round for more.
‘He certainly takes after you, Tommy,’ I remarked. ‘He can drink a bottle faster than you can get a pint of mild down your throat.’
Les ate everything in sight - books, newspapers, bed sheets - even the nose on Tommy’s face if he got the chance.
‘He keeps biting me,’Tommy complained.
‘But he likes you,’ I replied. ‘Look how he smiles whenever he sees you.’
‘That’s because he thinks, ah, here comes dinner.’
When Les reached the ‘suck it and see’ toddler stage, the whole family had to be on permanent sentry duty. When Les was not asleep, he was sucking on something: his toe, a bunch of keys, buttons, coins. When we lost something like the slop-stone plug, we knew where to look: ‘Check in the baby’s mouth! Quick!’There was no
point asking Les, ‘What have you got there in your mouth, love?’ for he never answered. On one or two occasions we’d had to hang him upside down and slap his back to recover our property, like a piece of coal, Tommy’s tie pin, studs or cuff links.
It was good to see Tommy joining in family life again after his period of black depression. He even began giving Jim football lessons, at first in the back yard and later on a nearby croft. One day they came back from training and I was surprised to see Tommy had a bloody nose.
‘What happened, Tommy?’ I asked. ‘Did you get the football in the face?’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ he laughed, holding a hankie to his nose. ‘I dribbled rings round our Jim here and he started moaning about it. I felt sorry for him and I said, “Right, Jim. Just for that, you can punch me as hard as you like here.” I meant my shoulder but the little bugger thumped me in the nose.’
Tommy had regained his enthusiasm for football and had become a keen supporter of Manchester City and was a regular visitor to the new Maine Road ground. His hero was Billy Meredith, the famous Welsh international. When City reached the Cup Final in 1926, Tommy booked his place on the coach to Wembley with the Queen’s Arms crowd. He was away all day Saturday but back in the early hours of Sunday morning.
‘How did they get on?’ I asked.
‘Don’t ask,’ he answered. ‘Bolton Wanderers won by a fluke goal. The only thing Fve got to say is that if we ever have another son, he won’t be called David or Jack. That’s for sure.’
‘Why’s that, Tommy?’
‘Because that’s the name of the bugger who scored for Bolton - David Jack.’
My life had become one long round of feeding faces, washing pots, cleaning the house, doing the laundry and the rest of it. I didn’t begrudge a moment of it, I loved having a secure, happy family around me. During these years after the war, we saw big changes in our lives. After the flu epidemic came the ‘roaring twenties’, not that we heard much roaring in Ancoats - the miserable twenties more like it. Lloyd George had promised us a land fit for heroes but the Great War hung over everything. At every street corner there were men simply hanging about - the unemployed, the disabled, and the occasional shellshocked victim babbling to himself about the trenches. Neurasthenia was the posh name they gave to the condition. Men were beginning to ask themselves what it was all for and they’d stopped whistling ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag’ and changed their tune to:
We won the war, what was it for?
You can ask Lloyd George, or Bonar Law.
There was one desperate man going around the streets in town with a placard round his back which said: I know 3 TRADES, I SPEAK 3 LANGUAGES, FOUGHT FOR 3 YEARS, HAVE 3 CHILDREN, AND NO WORK FOR 3 MONTHS BUT I ONLY WANT ONE JOB.
Tommy was lucky because he had regular work in the market and so we didn’t go short of food, not until the General Strike when the whole country nearly came to a halt. When the bakers joined in there were no loaves in the shops but we could get self-raising flour and so I made my own. When word got out that I knew how to bake bread, I had half a dozen neighbours in the house asking me to teach them. They brought their own stuff, flour, yeast and
that, but they were using rny oven non-stop and no one thought to bring coal or coke to help me out.
On the other side of the picture, the twenties were a time of great inventions, like the aeroplane and the motor car. We didn’t mind the first one so much as there weren’t many of them about but the second became a dangerous nuisance when some cars began driving at twenty miles an hour, and motorbikes roared round the streets.
There was the wireless. Tommy was always fiddling about with a crystal set, cat’s whiskers he called it. One day he called out all excited as if he’d found a five pound note, ‘Kate, Kate, come quick and listen to this. It’s Dame Nellie Melba!’
I put on the earphones as instructed but I couldn’t hear anything except a loud hissing noise. ‘Wait, wait,’ he said, ‘while I tickle the cat’s whisker.’ He fiddled about but I still couldn’t hear anything. It was much better when valve sets came in but I always preferred the HMV wind-up gramophone which he bought later, though we had only two records to begin with, Waldteufl’s Skaters'Waltz and Susa’s Stars and Stripes Forever.
Our local picture house was the Don on Beswick Street. Flo and Polly were always mythering me to take them to the first house. Not that it took much mythering to persuade me. We saw the latest films and idolised the stars of the day: Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and the heart-throb Rudolph Valentino with his flashing eyes, but it was the comics that really took our fancy - Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and'best of all, our own Charlie Chaplin who could have you laughing and crying at the same time in films like The Immigrant and The Gold Rush.
The American troops came over to fight in the war, and after they’d gone they left their way of life behind, not only in their films but in songs, dances, and even their way of
speaking. It was jazz, jazz, jazz, everywhere you turned. Jungle music, I called it. Flo was the first to be infected. She was fourteen and had taken her first job at Northcote’s, the fur coat makers on Oldham Road. Some of the other girls at work must have put the idea in her head for after a couple of weeks she came home and said she wanted to be a flapper.
‘A what?’ I exclaimed. ‘What is it? Some kind of bird with large wings?’
Flo explained that besides having her hair bobbed and shingled, it meant wearing a dress with tassels and beads and a raised hemline, rouging her cheeks, putting on lipstick, and taping her breasts flat - not that she had much breast to flatten.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ I told her. ‘You’ll get locked up walking about like that. Besides, your father would throw a fit if he saw you in that get-up.’
‘Aw, Mam,’ she said, ‘all the girls at work are doing it. And they’re learning me to do the Charleston at dinner times as well.’
Every spare minute she got, she practised the dance using a kitchen chair as support to disentangle her legs. Music was provided by Polly and Jim on paper and comb.
‘What’s the world coming to?’ I said to myself. ‘I must be getting old! Women smoking, drinking, painting their faces and doing these wild dances.’
Eddie was a regular visitor to the house. His war wounds had not disabled him - he wore black leather gloves and people hardly noticed he’d lost his fingers - and he’d managed to get a job as a watchman at the Refuge Assurance on Whitworth Street. Since we were within walking distance he made a habit of calling on us after work. He spent his time with us drinking huge mugs of tea and teaching young Jim soldiers’ songs of the trenches,
sung to popular hymn tunes. Every day, Jim could be seen marching through the house and singing at the top of his voice the unauthorised version of hymns like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’:
Forward Joe Soap’s Army Marching without fear With our old commander Safely in the rear.
This was fine as long as the songs were sung in the right place at the right time. The top of a public tram car was definitely not the right place as far as I was concerned. I was taking Jim into town to buy a new pair of shoes at Timpson’s on Market Street. It was raining heavily and this prompted my young son to break out with:
Raining, raining, raining Always bloody well raining Raining all the morning And raining all the day.
Sung to the hymn ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, Jim’s rendering was much appreciated by our fellow passengers who not only laughed loudly but rewarded him with a round of applause. I was glad to get off that tram at Piccadilly before Jim gave us the complete repertoire.
I bought Jim a nice pair of strong boots that would last him at least six months, given his habit of kicking a can or any other object that caught his attention on the way to school. As we came out of the shop, I bumped into an old friend. Miss Emma from Macclesfield! She looked older - as I suppose I did myself - but I’d have known her anywhere.
She didn’t recognise me at first but when it dawned on her, her face lit up.
‘Kate!’ she exclaimed. ‘How nice to see you after all this time! How long is it since we last met?’
‘I daren’t count the years,’ I replied. ‘But it’s a long time.’
We found a nearby teashop and there we settled down and caught up on each other’s news.
During the war, Emma had driven an ambulance but now she had taken a full-time appointment with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and was spending her time working for women’s emancipation.
‘There’s still a lot to do, Kate,’ she said. ‘We’ve succeeded in getting the vote for women over thirty but we won’t be happy until women have the same voting rights as men. Now tell me all that you’ve been doing since you left Macclesfield.’
I told her about my job at Westmacott’s, my marriage to Tommy and the seven children and how I’d lost two of them in 1916. When Emma heard that I’d had so many children, she was aghast.
‘All that child-bearing, Kate! How on earth did you manage? It must have left you utterly exhausted and drained!’
I didn’t think my family was particularly big compared to some of the other families in the district. Ten children or even more were not unusual.
‘We manage to get by somehow, Emma,’ I replied. ‘We have no choice - we have to.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I think I might be able to help you. One of our most active members has written a couple of books for women like you. I have them here with me. They were intended for another lady but I’m sure I can find replacements for her.’ She glanced round the room to
check that she was not being watched. Reaching into her large portmanteau, she handed me a brown paper package tied neatly with string. ‘Read these books when you get home but for God’s sake be sure that nobody else sees them or we’ll both end up in trouble.’
I took the package from her and thrust it quickly into my own handbag, feeling a bit like Mata Hari in a film about German spies. We parted company promising vaguely to keep in touch but both knowing in our hearts that we never would.
Next day, when Tommy had gone to work and the children to school, I put Les to sleep in his cradle and turned my attention to the package which I’d hidden under the bed. The two books were by a lady called Marie Stopes. I’d heard her name before because Tommy had read something out of the paper to me, something about her opening a ‘family planning’ clinic in London. Marie Stoppem, Tommy had called her.
The first one I opened was called Married Love and I could tell from the title that it was the sort of book that respectable people wouldn’t look at. But surely Miss Emma wasn’t the sort of person who would recommend a dirty book! I turned to the first page and began to read and even though I was alone, my face turned red with embarrassment. The book used expressions like ‘sexual relations’ and it seemed to be saying that a woman was supposed to enjoy it as much as a man. Marriage wasn’t just for having kids but it was also there for having a bit of fun in bed with your husband. Not just when he felt like it and demanded his marital rights but when the wife was in the mood for it as well. Marriage was to be an equal partnership! This went against everything I’d ever heard or been taught. For a married couple love-making (or sexual intercourse!) in itself, she claimed, was a sacrament and a couple was
entitled to take steps to prevent offspring being produced. In other words, a married pair could use - and I found it hard to bring myself to say the words even mentally - birth control! I’d seen the words before on the windows of a shop near Manchester Cathedral. The kind of shop that sold mysterious rubber devices and dirty books, and here was I reading about it in the privacy of my bedroom. If the first book was hot, the second entitled Wise Parenthood was torrid. It gave details of the methods that could be used to prevent babies: condoms, jellies, pessaries, potions, intrauterine rings (whatever they were) and one that had me puzzled, a Dutch cap. I wondered how wearing a hat in bed would stop a woman from having kids.
I was so absorbed examining the books that I’d forgotten the time. Hurriedly I put them back in their package and tied them up. Whatever happened, I mustn’t let Tommy see them. But what to do with them? I couldn’t put them on the fire ’cos they’d set the chimney alight. For the time being, I put them on top of the wardrobe next to Tommy’s pot hat. There wasn’t much danger of him looking up there unless he had to go to a funeral or a wedding.
Of course I had to tell Canon McCabe in confession about the books. When I gave him the titles, I thought he was going to have a heart attack. He spluttered and was having difficulty in catching his breath.
‘By looking at such books,’ he hissed, ‘you have committed a serious sin against the sixth commandment which forbids immodest songs, books and pictures because they are most dangerous to the soul. Do you understand?’
‘I do. Father.’
‘Do you still have these books in your possession?’
‘I do, Father.’
‘I shall give you absolution but it is conditional on your getting rid of them. And remember that the only family
planning permitted by the Church is the rhythm method. Now for your penance say twenty-five Our Fathers and say the Rosary ten times.’
He said the words of absolution. ‘Ego te absolvo . . . ’
A pretty heavy penance, I thought. Reading Marie Stopes’s stuff must be on a par with burglary or trying to murder your husband. And what was that rhythm method he had talked about? It sounded like it meant doing it to music. I put such sinful thoughts out of my mind or I’d have to go back to confession before I’d got out of the church.
Confession wasn’t the end of it though. The following Sunday at eleven o’clock Mass - the adult Mass - Canon McCabe based his sermon on the sixth commandment and in particular the reading of bad books. I’m sure he was looking at me the whole time he ranted on.
‘My dear brethren,’ he declaimed, ‘it is my duty to warn you of a number of obscene books which have been featured in the press lately. I refer to the work of a Dr Marie Stopes and her works on family planning.’
You could have heard a pin drop in the church. This was a subject that never failed to win their complete attention.
‘Dr Stopes’s own marriage is hardly an example to us. She is on her second husband, having discarded the first for non-consummation. Now she is married to a rich man and the reports are that they follow a lifestyle of free love which is more suitable for animals in the jungle or cats in the alley than in civilised society. We live in sinful times, my dear brethren, when well-to-do families prefer a baby Austin Seven to a real-live baby. This Marie Stopes woman has now provided such materialist people with the means by opening a family planning clinic where her vile methods of contraception are practised. Such methods are little
better than infanticide. Yet this woman would have you believe that God sent down this beastly, filthy message. I tell you, dear people, that it is more likely that she was visited by the devil himself, for make no mistake, Satan roams the world in strange guises.’
The congregation lapped this up. Tub-thumping preaching was music to their ears.
‘Have fewer babies, she says,’ Canon McCabe thundered. ‘Apart from the sinfulness of her ideas, she is recommending a reduction in the population at the very time when we are suffering the terrible losses of the war and the influenza epidemic. At a time when we need more souls and every ounce of good solid flesh and bone, we are faced by a series of books on how not to provide sons and daughters to carry on our traditions. If any members of this congregation have copies of the books I am referring to, I order you now, in the name of God, to get rid of them.’
When he gave this last command, I was a hundred per cent sure he was looking at me.
The next morning, I got Les out of his cot, dressed him and went out to do some shopping, taking the books with me. At the first tram stop, I dumped them in the litter bin. As I hurried away, I glanced back in time to see an old tramp rummaging through the bin and discovering the brown paper package. I wondered what he and his mates in Barney’s brickyard would make of it when they got down to reading its contents.