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

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СКАЧАТЬ scythes or garden shears – no one had a garden, but some had allotments – anything with an edge in need of sharpening. He’d pocket a few coppers from his first customer and then begin to pedal his ‘bike’. The grindstone spun faster and faster, and as he drew the edge of each knife or tool across it, a shower of sparks flew upwards, drawing squeaks of excitement from Florence and the crowd of other children who had gathered to watch.

      The chimney sweep would also make his rounds by horse and cart, with his brushes and sacks of soot stacked on the back. His skin was permanently ingrained with soot, and wisps of his incongruously fair hair peeped out from under a flat cap that was as black as the chimneys he swept. Sweeps were thought – by the superstitious at least – to bring good luck, and brides-to-be would position themselves so that he had to cross their path. Some even invited him to their wedding for luck, and having pocketed his fee, he would kiss the bride and make a black smudge on her cheek that she would leave untouched as a token of her future good fortune.

      When the coalman came down the street with his big, powerful horse dragging the high cart piled with sacks of coal and coke, the boys used to rush out and use the back of the cart as a swing as it bumped along over the cobbles. When the rag and bone man was on his rounds, like the other kids, Florence would run inside and see if she could find any old rags or pester her mum for the bones from the Sunday roast. In those hard times and mean streets, very little was thrown away, but apart from his two staples, the rag and bone man would also take scrap metal, such as aluminium pans with holes burned through the bottom, empty tins, broken toys, cracked china, scrap wood, worn-out shoes, and almost anything else that might have a scrap value, no matter how slight. In theory, if the children brought him enough, the rag and bone man would give them a goldfish, but in fact the goldfish in its little glass bowl appeared to be only for show, or perhaps the rags they brought were of too poor a quality, as the most that Florence or any of the other kids in the street ever seemed to receive was a balloon.

      An ice-cream van also used to come round once a week, and the driver, Mac, did a brisk trade in halfpenny cornets. On winter evenings there was the ‘hot pea man’, and when she heard his call, Florence’s mother would sometimes send her out with a halfpenny and an empty cup. The pea man would ladle the hot, mushy marrowfat peas into the cup and put a spoonful of mint sauce on top. Florence would carry it back inside, the cup so hot it almost burned her hands, and then she and her sisters would sit in front of the fire with it and take turns to eat small spoonfuls of the peas, trying to make them last as long as possible.

      On Friday nights a man came round with a little roundabout on the back of a horse and cart. He would tether the horse to a lamppost, swing out the roundabout on its steel support, and then hand-crank a handle to turn it. It was very basic, there was no music and it only had four hard metal seats, but the little kids loved to ride on it. Even though he charged just a halfpenny a ride, it was often more than Florence’s parents could afford to spend, so the halfpenny cornets and the roundabout rides were very occasional treats. Money was so tight in their house that every time the gas man came to read the meter and empty the coin box – all the houses in the street had coin meters for the gas – Florence would wait until he had gone, and then rush to search the space under the stairs where the meter was in case he had dropped a penny or a halfpenny. He never had, but she never gave up looking, just in case.

      When Florence was seven, the entire street was demolished under the slum clearance programme and the family was moved to a brand-new council house in Pottery Lane. Florence was delighted when they went to see it and she discovered that it had the luxury of a handbasin with taps. Even then they still had to use an outside toilet – it wasn’t until they eventually moved to a four-bedroom house in Foss Way years later that they had a bathroom as well: ‘We thought we’d died and gone to heaven when we got there!’ Florence says.

      Florence had started school at St George’s, but then went to St Wilfrid’s when they moved house, and stayed there until she left school at fourteen. There was little doubt about where she would work when she grew up. Her dad was one of only two members of the family not employed by Rowntree’s – he worked at the electricity station on Foss Islands Road – but all her brothers and two of her sisters worked there; even her mum had worked there as well before she got married. She was one of the first ‘pipers’, using an icing bag full of liquid chocolate to pipe swirls onto the chocolate assortments, in the original Rowntree’s factory at Tanners Moat by the river.

      Florence finished school on a Friday in July 1937 and started work at Rowntree’s the following Monday. ‘There was only Rowntree’s, Terry’s and the railways in York really,’ she says. ‘If you didn’t go to one of them, you’d have struggled to find work at all. Mind, you couldn’t walk straight into Rowntree’s like you could at Terry’s; you had to pass the tests that they gave you, but you knew if you passed the medical and the tests, that’s where you’d be going. It was seen as the best place to work; they were good to you, Rowntree’s, with medical care and everything.’

      Even those girls who did not at first follow the well-trodden route straight from school through the factory gates at Rowntree’s often turned up there within a couple of years. One of Florence’s workmates, Dot Edwards, started at Terry’s instead when she was fourteen, and spent two and a half years there. ‘I Cellophaned a lovely big fancy box for the Queen while I was there,’ she says. ‘It was on display in Terry’s window for a while, but then they went on short-time working, where you did two weeks on, but then you were off for two weeks. There was no unemployment money then so I only had half the money I’d had before – and at age fourteen it was only nine shillings and eightpence a week, even when I was working full time – so I decided to leave and went to Rowntree’s instead. I had a brother and a sister already working there and that was how you got on to work at Rowntree’s in those days; if you had relatives working there, you had preference over everyone else.’

      Girls without family connections often found themselves drawn to Rowntree’s by peer pressure or the gravitational pull of the city’s biggest employer. The mother of another of Florence’s contemporaries, Madge Tillett, had planned a career for her daughter in hairdressing and had even secured her an apprenticeship. ‘My mum used to go to a hairdressers in Clarence Street,’ she says, ‘and she got me a place there, and in those days you had to pay a premium to learn. But when they asked us at school, “Where do you want to go?” all my friends said “Rowntree’s”, and when they got to me I said “Rowntree’s” as well, because if all my schoolfriends were going to be there, I wanted to be there, too. I thought, “Whatever am I going to say to my mum?” and she was really furious with me, but luckily my dad stuck up for me and said, “Let her go where she wants to.” So, like almost all of my friends, I went to work at Rowntree’s.’

      Another girl, Marjorie Cockerill, was planning to join the Co-op and work in the kitchens, but when she told her father, he said, ‘You’re not going into the kitchens – you’re that clumsy, you’ll cut your hands off. Get yourself to Rowntree’s and get a job there.’ Muriel Jones, who had lost both of her parents within ten months of each other when she was young, and had been taken in by her aunt and uncle, saw a similar lack of sympathy from her guardian. ‘When I left school,’ she says, ‘and had “had a rest”, as my uncle called it, over the weekend, he said, “Right, now get yourself over to Rowntree’s and see if you can get a job.”’

      Rowntree’s also gave employment to people from other areas of the country. One of them, eighteen-year-old Gwen Barrass, left her home in Cramlington, Northumberland, to work at Rowntree’s in 1938 without knowing a single soul in York. At the railway station she had to find the girls who were to be lodging at the same address as her – one girl from Washington, County Durham, and two from Newcastle – none of whom she had ever met before. They shared a room in a boarding house and were each charged one pound a week for full board at their lodgings, but it was very poor quality and the food they were given was almost inedible. Her wage as an adult was one pound eighteen shillings a week and she tried to send a few shillings home to her mother every week, so she did not have much left СКАЧАТЬ