My father was a painter and decorator, as was his father, and, for a while my grandfather's younger brother Harry, my cousin David, and my nephew Ross. I too learned the trade. I must have started working with my father at the age of twelve or thirteen, and continued working in the summer holidays with him till I finished university. I have always appreciated the practical skills I gained confidence in through him, and his attention to detail. I shall never forget being taught how to sweep a floor properly. it took several tries and a demonstration before my floor was swept to a sufficient standard.
Decorating came into the family through desperation. It was in 1923, when my father was a year old, and my grandfather was out of work as a result of being made redundant by the Great Depression, and having spent all his savings in paying rent to his own father, that my grandfather started knocking on doors in Moss Side and Hulme asking the occupiers if he could whitewash their cellars. it was thus that his business started and it grew. He too paid attention to detail and cared for his customers as my father did, and like my father he loved his work. Unlike me both my grandfather and father lived to work, whereas I worked to live, and engage in the activities that were my passion. After his retirement to Devon my grandfather's greatest pleasure was to return to Manchester to work with my father. my father continued working well into his eighties. He decorated my enormous staircase single-handed when 82 years old.
I grew up in a household where we learnt early about paint and wallpaper. There was a room in the attic complete filled from ceiling to floor to hold stocks of wallpaper - it was known as the Wallpaper Attic. It also had a supply of paintbrushes. In the Paint Cellar, excavated under the house by my grandfather in the 1940s, there were further racks at the far end filled with wallpapers, but also housing cans of pigment and linseed oil, and a crate of sawn volcanic pumice stone for rubbing down enamelled woodwork. At the near end of the Paint Cellar cans of paint were stood and brushes standing in water to prevent the paint drying. The door did have a lock but we didn't use a key: if one slipped one's hand over the top of the door one could reach the handle to open it. At a point facing the door behind the cans of paint it was possible to enter the main house through a secret opening in the floor where the floorboards were cut. This was our salvation when we had no front door key and had been locked out of the house.
A strange but memorable and exciting treat when children was provided when my father would bring home a new wallpaper pattern book from Painters' Supply, the wholesale supply of which my grandfather had been a shareholder. In those days my father would take these pattern books to a customer so that they could choose their wallpaper. I remember names such as Walpamur, Sandersons, Shand Kydd, and John Lines. We would turn the pages and look and feel the papers. Eventually many of these papers would be used for wrapping gifts, but especially for covering our school text books and exercise books. We rarely used brown paper for this purpose.
A special day came in about 1960 when my father brought home a new pattern book containing the newly reissued papers of William Morris, and I was captivated, even going to the showrooms in central Manchester and asking for samples that I treasured. Like a printed paper in an eighteenth-century book these papers had a texture, you could feel the slight thickness of the ink, appreciate the rich colours, and understand from the edge of the paper the process of printing successive colours to achieve the finished result.
 |
|
My father did a job for a Mr Topping in Spring Bridge Road round the corner from our home which was the first time I saw whole rolls of these William Morris wallpapers. They had to be hand trimmed on both edges, and as this particular wallpaper was printed in gold, extreme care had to be taken to keep paste off the surface. There was a small quantity of this wallpaper left at the end of the job, and at my request my father used it on an old room divider screen that my grandparents had left at Manley Road. I still have the screen, covered in the William Morris 'Indian' design in gold, a colourway I have never seen or found again.
 |
| Screen with "Indian" |
I similarly fell in love with Laura Ashley wallpapers and fabrics when Brana and I set up home together in the 1980s, firstly in Bideford and then in Crediton. Culver House especially needed large quantities of wallpaper and fabric, and we bought whole rolls of fabric in the sale, and scores of rolls of wallpaper. I especially appreciated the designs based on what are called documents: fragments of wallpaper or fabric that survive from the past.
However, I did indulge my passion for William Morris in Culver House, so that the drawing room was papered completely with a William Morris wallpaper.
 |
| "Bird and Anemone" |
I am fearless in my love of wallpaper, enjoying rich patterns and colours when Brana would prefer the magnolia with which she grew up, but she has been tolerant of my passions. It has been me who has sewn the curtains we needed, but my father over twenty years generously gave of his skills and time to decorate rooms for us. I know he would love to follow his father and help me again, even though he is now 94. I have a large stock that I have built up over the past fifteen years of wallpapers by William Morris and others, such as Cole and Sons and Watts and Co, all special papers that give me pleasure to look at and appreciate.
 |
| "Seaweed" |
 |
| "Brocade" |
My father and grandfather both kept good records, detailing each job, with the customer's name, the work done and the materials used. Many of the customers' names I recognise. Some I knew from working in their homes, many I knew from answering the telephone for my father, or from hearing him talk about them. Some I never knew but stories about them live on, so that I only have to propose a name to my father and memories come flooding back, both for him and for me.
I first met chickens at my grandparents in Manchester when I was four or five years old. During the war they had swopped their egg ration for a poultry meal allowance, and the hens were fed mash mixed with boiled potato peels and food scraps, and some hot water. I was fascinated by them, and fell in love with them.
My great grandmother also had a few chickens, kept in cages next to the back door of Sharston Farm. They didn't have much room, they were prototype battery hens in the early 1950s, but they produced eggs for her. When my uncle Philip and Aunt Lyn moved to Mons Hall in 1955 they had a mixed farm, with pigs, sheep, hand-milked cows and free range chickens. I enjoyed going with a basket to carefully collect their eggs, sometimes slipping my hand under their warm bodies to retrieve the eggs.
It must have been in about 1960 that I bought my first bantam hen, a Light Sussex that I named Biddy.
She was followed at some stage by Polly Molly Twinkletoes, a grey Polish bantam hen with a rather poor crest.
I subscribed to Poultry World, a magazine aimed at the commercial trade, but it had at least adverts, where I was eventually able to order nine day old Welsummer bantam chicks when Biddy fell broody.
I was fortunate in that eight of the chicks were pullets, with just the one cockerel. He was named Augustine, and he was a particularly fine bird, and rather aggressive too. It was Augustine who attacked my sister Dana when she came to the back door and found it locked. She was too scared to run away and escape, and his spurs left her with bleeding shins.
Welsummers are handsome birds that lay brown eggs, even the bantams that I kept. The hens have an attractive brown plumage with a dark edging to each feather, but the cocks are glorious, with chestnut, golden and beetle blue plumage.
Keeping poultry gave me an excuse for a regular Saturday bus trip into Manchester where I would go down Tib St, famous then for its pet shops, and buy supplies of poultry food: chick crumbs for the newly hatched chicks, and mash for the adults. Mash would be mixed with left over food scraps, and boiled potato peelings with their distinctive smell, and some hot water. Later a pet shop in Withington Road kept a stock of poultry food that I purchased in weekly instalments.
When I went to university in 1968 the chickens stayed behind, and eventually the last two went into retirement to my Aunt Lyn in Devon where I believe they survived for at least ten years.
There was a gap then in my poultry keeping until, in 1981, I went to live in Bideford. We had only a small backyard, but the outside toilet became their shed, and I made a hole i the wall where there had once been a window, so that the chickens were able to access a wild, overgrown patch encircled by the old houses. I think these chickens were a broody and chicks that I purchased at Hatherleigh market, and then walked back with them down the lanes to my grandmother's about four miles away. I suspect we would have then taken them on the bus back to Bideford, as we had no car then. Eventually I had to dispose of them as we were about to go abroad, and in my usual way there were executed with my axe I kept for this.
When we moved to Crediton and acquired an extremely large garden keeping poultry became a normal part of my life. I think the first ones were Black Minorcas.
I kept them at the very far end of the garden an eighth of a mile away from the house down the former lane that forms part of the property. I built a hut using scrap timber, and an adjacent covered run using spare slates from when I reroofed the house. The twice daily walk down to see them meant that the garden did not become overgrown, and in the evenings one or more of the children would accompany me, and we would give them corn, replace their water, let them out for a scratch, and sit in the adjacent hut. At different times we had Old English Game bantams,
mongrel bantams from Braunton where we stayed on half-term holidays and which I selectively bred back to Black Sultans with glossy plumage like the Minorcas, but vulture hocks, cresting and feathered feet.
Also part of our menagerie were Buff Cochin bantams acquired from a distant cousin in Crediton,
Light Brahma full-size chickens bought as chicks in Hatherleigh market but which turned out to be all cockerels, that stomped in the run like dinosaurs.
These were all eaten, big birds with good-flavoured meat that hid in the freezer till their deaths were forgotten, and were taken out to make excellent casseroles. I think our last birds were the full-sized Faverolles, hatched from eggs acquired from our neighbours at Downs Home Farm, lovely big birds with very attractive plumage that laid light brown eggs.
Eggs were aways in plentiful supply, and in Spring the supply often became a deluge so that many eggs were used for cakes, and for packed-lunch sandwiches. Sometimes I'd use thirty small bantam eggs at a time.
Poultry keeping came to an abrupt end after fifty years when I was away in Sheffield at a training conference for work and just once the chickens weren't locked up at night, and they all died. I decided not to keep chickens again.
Recently, because of my illness, I have had great pleasure in cooking and eating food with happy associations from my childhood. Early memories of food my mother cooked, of meals at Manley Road cooked by my grandmother, of meals she cooked on the farm in her slow oven. They all have a Proustian effect, bringing back usually a glimpse of happiness.
Not all memories are good. I grew up in post-war poverty and food shortages, and I remember my sister spitting out a chewy lump of meat and my father saying I could eat it. hen I refused he demonstrated it was fine to eat by eating it himself. Christmas dinners were not happy events. They were always rather fraught, with my mother locking herself tearfully in the bedroom on some occasions. Plans were not made for the shortage of income in December - householders do not usually want the disruption of a decorator in the house in December - so sometimes there wasn't money to pay for Christmas food and presents. Sometimes the food of poverty can bring a happy memory. I remember telling my mother how fondly I remembered eating rice with tomato sauce as a child, and she confessed that this was something she made when she was absolutely desperate and had nothing else to offer.
There were other special occasions though. I remember as a young child my mother bravely making filo pastry from scratch, stretching it out on her rolling pin, to make apple strudel. She must have been inspired by memories of her own mother's cooking. I have a couple of memories of my Italian grandmother and food, which must date to when we visited them in their apartment in via Alcuino in about 1956. One is of eating with her chickens' feet boiled in broth, not so much a delicacy as the food of poverty. Another is of her taking us to a friend's, and their jointly making ravioli from scratch, making and rolling out the dough, making and placing the fillings, covering the whole with another layer of rolled out dough, and then cutting through with a roller. The ravioli were then taken home and cooked for us to eat.
One dish my mother made and wish I still make and enjoy is polenta, served with a topping of finely cut lambs' liver and onions. The polenta is easier to cook now, as I think, like couscous, it is sold partly precooked.
My English grandmother's cuisine was very different. Tour de force was always Sunday lunch, cooked as I remember it in the range in the kitchen. Roast beef, gravy made from the juice with the addition of gravy browning and flour, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and vegetables. With the move to Devon this was not so easy as my grandmother economised on fuel by cooking at consistently lower temperatures, which meant Yorkshire puddings would not rise and pies were often anaemic in appearance even if delicious in taste.
She also made wonderful pies, using the vast quantities of produce she grew. For most of my life this meant sterilising and filling Kilner jars with blackcurrants, blackberries, raspberries and plums. These provided fillings for pies every day throughout the year till fresh fruit was available. Egg custards were large and in pastry lined dishes. Custard was usually supplanted by fresh cream skimmed from the churn in the dairy next to the cows' shippen.
I remember my grandmother regularly making fruit cake to be served daily at teatime, and I still make it myself. She was also punctilious in making her Christmas puddings, and her large, square Christmas cake, complete with grated carrot as well as dried fruit and glacé cherries, both to recipes which we still have and my sister still uses.
She also made homemade wine, but especially bees wine, a culture that was fed daily with sugar and ground ginger that was eventually diluted and bottled in screw-top brown glass bottles and kept in the bathroom, a cold room at the north end of the ground floor off the living room that was once a dairy.
An early memory is of having tea with Battenburg cake with Miss May Holden, the invalid sister of one of my father's customers. This was served by her housekeeper in her kitchen, where there was a curious fret-sawed parrot that balanced with the help of its tail. Miss May lived with her brother in an enormous Victorian mansion owned by their parents in Whalley Range. The brother later filled the house with lots of gay students and enjoyed his life with them. I still eat Battenburg cake and retain my fond memories of that visit.
There was a shop in Hulme that sold nothing but Eccles cakes, freshly baked on the premises. The smell was wonderful when you passed on the 80 or 88 bus, and I still eat Eccles cakes nearly every week, with their buttery flaky pastry and currant-filled interior.
