Harriet Sergeant’s comment in The Times (7 Dec 08), is a worrying view of the society in which we live in the UK. I consider myself very privileged to have been raised in a previous generation, even though they were tough times. For a few of my formative years I was one of three children with a single parent. I recall as a 6 year-old being left sat on a bench seat alone in one of those white disinfected high narrow corridors while my father disapeared through double doors into a dimly lit ward to see my mother. Children were not allowed in the ward - but neither was stretching my vocal chords in an echoing corridor! A sympathetic - and perhaps compassionate ward sister - in starched blue and white - consoled me and led me to my father at my mother’s bedside. Those were the last moments I recall being with mother.
Things must have been tough for my father - but especially for my thirteen year old sister. She helped look after me and my older brother while father was at work. As well as keeping up school attendance, with my mother’s illness my older sister had already taken on the role of ‘mother’ in a home with a coal fire with oven where she boiled and baked our dinners. There were red quarry tiles in the kitchen to be scubbed down and a back boiler in the back kitchen in which she did the washing and a large mangle in the back yard on which my brother and I took turns or together wrestled with the handle as sister fed bed sheets and clothes through the wooden rollers. The tin bath we bathed in front of the coal fire hung on the back wall, by the mangle. Hers was a tough life for a young teenager. Her role helped keep the family unit together - deserving of a child carer award.
We were as poor as many other folk back then but my brother and I joined dad in the gardening to produce fruit and veg and raise poultry for meat and eggs. Despite the hardships, dad still took time for family walks, story telling and fret sawing on the kitchen table - we made patterns from paper to make our own toys from plywood sides of dismantled teachests. Life can be very unfair, but for our family, poverty was not an excuse for being dysfuntional and a burden on society. Harriet Sergeant’s article has sent me down memory lane.
