The Sweethearts: Tales of love, laughter and hardship from the Yorkshire Rowntree's girls. Lynn Russell

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      Madge felt a little crestfallen that her mother was treating her success at gaining a job so matter of factly – paid work of any kind wasn’t exactly thick on the ground in 1932 – and her disappointment must have shown in her face, because a moment later her mum’s expression softened and she gave Madge a hug. ‘I’m proud of you,’ she said. ‘Now get yourself changed and go and enjoy your afternoon off. It’s the last one you’ll be having on a weekday for quite a while.’ She winked at their neighbour. ‘About fifty years, if all goes to plan.’ Madge could hear them still laughing at the joke as she hurried upstairs to get changed.

      Madge was even excused helping with the tea that night, though she and Rose were quite adept at dodging those duties anyway. The next sister, Laura, always did more than her share, and as she was making the tea she would often say plaintively to her sisters, ‘Come on, you two, I’ve been at work the same as you, give me a hand,’ but Rose and Madge would usually find ways to sneak off and not reappear until tea was actually on the table, and most of the time they would get away with nothing worse than a reproachful look from Laura.

      Madge was born in the house in Rose Street on 29 May 1918 – Royal Oak Day. The First World War was still raging and her father was away fighting on the Western Front. He didn’t set eyes on his new daughter until eight months later, when he was demobbed after the end of the war. Madge was the youngest of ten children – seven girls and three boys. Her dad had ginger hair and her mum was fair, he was right-handed and she was left-handed, and their ten children were split along similar lines: five of them had ginger hair and five of them – including Madge – had fair hair; five of them, again including Madge, were left-handed and five of them were right-handed.

      Rose Street was about 200 yards long, running the full distance between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road. There were fifty identical terraced houses on either side of the street, with a narrow back lane behind them. There was virtually no traffic in the street at all – only one of all the occupants of the houses in the street had a car, and even that was used only at weekends – so the local kids could play in the street all day long. Madge and her friends had a skipping rope, fixed to a hook in the wall and stretching from one side of the street to the other, and she can still remember the skipping rhyme she and her friends used to sing on her birthday.

      Twenty-ninth of May,

      Royal Oak Day,

      If you don’t give us a holiday,

      We’ll all run away.

      Where shall we run to?

      Down the lane,

      To see the teacher with the cane.

      The girls would play rounders in the street as well, while the boys played cricket in summer with an old tennis ball and a wooden crate for stumps, and in winter they kicked an old, scuffed leather football around, and when that was lost they used a bundle of rags, tightly bound together with string, as a substitute.

      There was a corner shop at the end of Rose Street. When Madge was small it was a sweet shop, and her parents or one of her older sisters would sometimes give her and Rose a penny to go and buy some sweets. ‘I used to think I could buy the whole shop for a penny,’ Madge says. ‘Rose and I would stand there for ages trying to decide what to buy.’

      The rooms in the two-up, two-down houses were very small, so much so that a tall man could stand with his arms outstretched in any of the rooms and almost touch the opposite walls simultaneously. Downstairs there was a kitchen at the back with a floor of bricks, and a coal fire with an oven alongside it where Madge’s mum used to do her baking. As a child, one of Madge’s jobs was to polish the oven once a week with black lead. There were twelve mouths to feed, and every other day her mum would make up big bowls of bread dough, leave it to rise and then bake it in the fire oven, filling the house with the delicious aroma of fresh-baked bread. The big wooden table where she made the bread was also used to scrub the clothes on washday – Monday – the day of the week the girls used to dread. All of them were roped in to help with the task of washing and airing the sheets and clothes from the week, and with their mum too busy washing to cook, the Monday evening meal was usually an unappetizing cold spread of the leftovers from Sunday.

      Madge’s mum and dad didn’t go out often – aside from anything else they couldn’t afford it – but once in a while they would get dressed up in their Sunday best clothes and go to the Grand picture house to see a film. Madge and Rose would sit on the edge of their mum’s bed, watching her putting on her make-up, and they’d say to each other, ‘We’ll do that when we’re older.’ Once their parents had gone out, despite all their promises of good behaviour, the children would go wild around the house, with Madge’s brother Jimmy and sister Laura getting up on the wooden table in the kitchen and dancing like mad.

      The front room was kept for best and only used on Sundays. One Sunday, Madge’s sister Ginny was coming through from the kitchen with a shovelful of coals to light the little fire when Madge came running out of the room, straight onto the edge of the red-hot shovel. It could have blinded her, but it missed her eyeball by millimetres and she escaped with a bad burn on her eyelid. There was a piano in the front room and Madge was sent to a music teacher for piano lessons, but she was so desperate to get out and play with her friends in the street that she barely ever practised at home. She used to sit in the front room and bang away on the piano, while her mum, who had a tin ear for music, would call out from the kitchen, ‘That’s good, our Madge.’ The truth was, the family had wasted their money, because Madge could only just about play ‘Chopsticks’ and nothing else.

      Upstairs there were two and a half bedrooms: two bedrooms and a tiny boxroom where her brother Dick slept. He made a hole in the door and used to spy on his sisters and tease them, usually leading to a noisy chase down the stairs. Madge’s mum and dad had one room, though they shared it with their youngest children when they were small, and the rest of the kids slept three and four to a bed, topped and tailed, with two at the top of the bed and two at the bottom. Madge slept that way every night for five years. Only when the eldest boy, John, and their eldest sister, Edna, had both left home and got married did the congestion ease a little. Somehow there was also room in the tiny house for a large collie dog as well.

      There was no bathroom in the house, just a tin bath hanging on a hook on the outside wall next to the back door; the toilet was also outside, next to the coal shed at the end of the long, narrow yard. It was what was called a ‘duckett’ toilet, like a bucket with a wooden seat over it. When they were younger, Madge and her sister Rose used to go out there with a candle after dark and drop candle wax on the backs of their hands, then go in and say, ‘Look at all the spots we’ve got!’ in the hope of persuading their mother that they had gone down with measles or some other infectious disease that would have got them a few days off school. Madge’s mum was not born yesterday, however, and was not so easily fooled. ‘I’ll give you spots,’ she’d say, and chase them out of the room.

      Madge was a little scared of the dark out in the yard, with the wind blowing, rustling the dead leaves and making the door creak, and if she wanted to go to the toilet at night, she always waited for Rose and went with her. When Rose had finished with the toilet and it was Madge’s turn, Rose used to say, ‘Right, I’m going now,’ and pretend she was going to go back into the house, while Madge was crying and saying, ‘I’m going to tell my mam if you don’t stop it.’

      There was a little raised flowerbed in one corner of the yard where her mum grew flowers such as geraniums and pansies, and a home-made pigeon loft where one of Madge’s brothers used to keep a few fan-tailed doves. Madge’s mum would block up the grate in the middle of the yard and fill it with water so that the pigeons could have a drink and a bathe. They also kept an old drake that lived in a pen at the end of the yard. СКАЧАТЬ