Chapter four - My 'Making Ends Meet' Years

The next ten years after my Father died were to be a real testing time for the lessons my Father taught me. Life wasn't easy for a divorcee with four children in the 1960's, and £9 18sh was all I had in the world. So I had to think of ways to earn a little extra, and the opportunity came when I saw an advert in the ‘Star for an assistant to serve meals to students at Ranmoor from 4-6pm Saturdays and Sundays. I applied and got the job; the wage was 12/6d (62p).

I couldn't have gone without my daughter Marilyn who looked after our Peter. In fact I couldn't have done a lot of things without her help, she would only be about twelve at the time. When I look back now, I realise what a lot I put on her young shoulders. Any happiness she now has, she truly deserves.

So, I had a job! We had a uniform given us; it was a coffee coloured apron and lace-trimmed hat. There were about four of us and we were expected to wash up after serving dinner. I made good friends with Alice Ginniver, Sally Smythe and Nelly Kinder.

The first cleaning job I had was with a Mrs Foster who lived nearby. I would get our Peter to sleep in his pram, take him with me and hope he stayed asleep till I got the work done. I would do the downstairs one week and the upstairs the next. Not much humour there I'm afraid. Mrs Foster a teacher would leave a full chamber pot under the bed to be emptied although there was a bathroom on the landing. I was paid 2/6d (12p) an hour, well, every little helped.

Then Mrs Beckett who had a grocer's shop at the corner of Commonside and Springhill Rd. asked me if I would help a Mr Sermin who had a big house on Bower Rd. He had just lost his wife and lived with his son Peter. I got my Mother-in-Law to look after our Peter while I worked Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Mr Sermin was a very quiet dapper little man; he had a jewellery shop at Highfields. He told me he and his sister while on holiday in Germany in 1914, were interned for the duration, although his sister was exchanged with a German prisoner from England.

Tuesdays I used to wash and iron, it was a small Hoover washer and separate spin drier. I've never liked Hoover washers, the sleeves of shirts used to come out all tangled up. There was always about eight white shirts and loose collars. Before I came Mr Sermin used to send his loose collars to the Chinese laundry at that time at Broomhill, while all his other laundry went to the Quick Press laundry.

Thursday mornings I would do the housework. Mr Sermin's bedroom was huge. There was a bedroom suite, double bed, a large settee and easy chair, wash hand stand and chest of drawers and still room to waltz around. There was no central heating and in winter I used to put a balaclava helmet on and woollen mittens and rush around with the Hoover to keep warm. Once, in my haste to get done, I knocked a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary off a chest of drawers. Panic set in when I saw I had decapitated her. I rushed up to North's at the top of Barber Road and bought a tube of Plastic Padding I'd seen advertised on T.V. hoping Mr Sermin hadn't noticed the repair; my hopes were dashed when next week he told me I'd stuck the head on the wrong way! But he was a good sort and saw the funny side of it.

By this time I was paid 5/- (25p) an hour and got a job for a Mrs Cole at Nether Edge. I was with her for years and we became friends and were like one of the family. Mrs Beckett again asked me if I could fit in a Mr Crum at Kingfield Rd. Nether Edge. So from Mrs Coles I used to go straight to Mr Crum's. He worked nights for Sheffield Newspapers, so as I got there he would be just getting up. He would do dinner for the two of us; he was a really good cook. He had a lady friend and I hadn't been there too long before he married and I left. I really missed those meals.

I wasn't short of work for long, as Mrs Beckett asked again if I could help a Mrs Robinson at Dore for five hours once a fortnight. She was a real character, had a cheque and money lending business. She would leave soon after I arrived to go on her rounds collecting money off her customers. They all lived in the poorer parts of Sheffield and she would tell me how difficult it was to get them to pay up.

She asked me to call her Doris; she could speak as though she was born and bred at Dore and just as easily turn out blue broad Yorkshire! She hadn't married until she was forty, and had had a gay life. I think her husband had made out he was a lot more affluent than he was. They had a son in the first year of marriage and thought his duty done.

When I first started, she asked me if I liked tripe and onions as her husband and son didn't like them and she hadn't had any since she was young. So every week she'd do tripe and onions for dinner until I thought they were coming out of my head! But she was a good sort, we got to be friends, and she was always appreciative of the work I did for her. She said there weren't many who ‘bottomed’ a room like I did.

Doris knew I had been in the Land Army and asked me if I would help a Mrs Manning on Newfield Lane to keep her garden tidy. Well I knew nothing about flowers and pretty gardens, I'd been used to potato picking, threshing and sugar beet bashing. But another few shillings came in handy; I had by this time with the houses I went to, a nice little business going.

I didn't do too much gardening, more weeding. Then Mrs Manning asked me if I would do some spring-cleaning in the house. When I first went there I was surprised to see Mary Chester who cooked for them and did a little light housework. Mary had lived in Handley St. where I was born. She was the same age as our Margaret; it was nice to talk over old times.

Mr Manning had a warehouse at Sharrow Vale Rd, Hunters Bar. They used to supply small corner shops with just about everything small corner shops used to sell. They had a beautiful house on Newfield Lane, it was really a bungalow built to look like a house in keeping with the other houses. Although they had the trappings of the very rich, a Rolls Royce, luxury caravan, they lived very carefully. Mrs Manning would never waste anything; she'd make herself aprons out of old dresses. She didn't have a son till she was turned forty, and he was sent to a boarding school near Blackpool when he was about eleven. She used to show me letters from him when he first went to boarding school, pleading to let him come home. He would even run away and telephone his parents from a phone box at Dore. His father would bring him home, give him a meal and drive him straight back to school. I asked her if it didn't worry her that he was so unhappy. But she said it was character building for him.

In time Mary Chester left because she had Parkinson's disease, so Mrs Manning came to rely on me more. She had me cutting, colouring, perming and setting her hair. She seemed to think I had a flair for hairdressing as well as housework. Perhaps I ought not to have flattered myself. I suspect I was cheaper than the hairdresser's. I once papered one wall of their lounge and cleaned a huge Chinese carpet with a small scrubbing brush and some 1001 carpet cleaner. Oh! How she sang my praises!

But I liked her, and really felt sorry for her; she had so much more than I, yet she had nothing. It was about 1968, she told me they were selling the warehouse and house as they had bought a factory in Lancashire that manufactured firelighters bleach, washing up liquid etc and had bought a huge house, which they said Roger Moore once owned. So she asked me if I would come every day to see to the central heating boiler and it was winter time, also to show prospective buyers round the house. To think a detached house with a quarter of an acre of garden on Newfield Lane, architect designed, went for £16,000.

The Mannings used to come home every Friday night until early Monday mornings. By the time I arrived the boiler had gone out and there would be a note saying "I'm sure you can use this piece of beef left over from the Sunday joint." She would stop 10/- (50p) out of my wages. I've often wondered why I didn't walk out and leave the boiler unlit and let the pipes freeze up.

I guess the Manning's was the last cleaning job I had. I couldn't get a proper job because I was classed as a single person, and would have had to pay stamps etc., also make up my allowance money the many times it wasn't paid. There was no help from anyone; I try to forget the times I've gone to bed at night, without 4d in my purse to buy a loaf of bread, until next day when I went to one of my many cleaning jobs. Another lesson from Father, they were your children, and you had to get on with it.

Those days were not all doom and gloom, far from it. Unlike today we had no one to envy, my children were the only ones at school whose parents were divorced, yet no on knew. They all had lovely Christmas presents, mainly paid for through the two catalogue clubs I ran. One was ‘Trafford’ and the other ‘Grattons,’ a lot of neighbours were my customers. The two shillings on the pound commission came in handy at Whitsuntide and Christmas.

My children knew our circumstances, they never mithered me for anything. I really was blessed with good children. I'm very proud to say my eldest son at eighteen went to Cambridge University to study the Classics. He had a grant like everyone else, he got there through his own abilities, and I suppose my support. My daughter was blessed with warmth and commonsense. She would have liked to take up hairdressing, but as there was no wage to speak of while training, she never took this up. I could have helped her more, but just keeping our heads above water, I did the best I could for us all. My second son studied art and eventually passed to Harrogate Art College. He is now a lecturer at Sheffield College and University. My youngest son, being only a few months old when I divorced, never knew his father really. He always wanted to join the army, which he did when he was seventeen. Just before his 19th birthday while serving in Germany he married a German girl with two small children and has been married nearly 22 years.

I have now five lovely granddaughters and four grandsons. I love them all.

I don't regret my making ends meet years, they very rewarding, full of humour, hard work. But Dad used to say, "Hard work never killed anyone, worry did." I don't think we are any happier or more content today with all the privileges we have.

These have been memories of the first half of my life; my father and I were left to bring up our families in our early thirties. We both remarried in our late forties.

Yes, father you taught me many lessons in life, gave me humour, how to accept your lot. We weren't perfect by any means, but we did our best.