My childhood was spent in a tiny two up two down, no bathroom, outside lavatory, no hot water terraced house in Preston. It was one of the millions of houses built in the middle years of the 19th century for the millworkers in the northern mill towns. Despite the humbleness of the houses, however, there were certain expectations on behalf of the residents of these streets. These were not written down or legally imposed but vigorously and rigorously reinforced by the women of these narrow streets – woe betide any woman who did not keep the frontage of her house up to scratch! Windows had to be kept clean, net curtains washed with regularity, door knockers polished and above all the concrete paving flags, door steps and window sills of the property’s frontage were scrubbed and “donkey stoned” weekly. Any woman of the street failing to abide by these “rules” would be shunned, be the recipient of withering glances and searing comment in the local shops, and protracted discussion behind closed doors and net curtains! For the uninitiated, donkey stones were made from a mixture of pulverised stone, cement, bleach and water and were like a small, thin brick or large tablet of soap. Each week (or more often) northern housewives would wash their front door steps, window sill and the concrete flags outside the house. While the flags and step were still wet they would be scrubbed with the donkey stone. As they dried the flags, step and window sill took on a “cleaner” hue. Different “shades” of stone could be bought (or even got in exchange for a few bits of old clothing or junk from the Rag and Bone man) ranging from what we might call off white to beige but all did the same thing, provide a bit of “cosmetic surgery” to make the house, humble though it was, look clean, attractive and a bit brighter. It was a bit like putting wet chalk on the concrete and then rubbing it in. I assume that the scrubbing and the bleach content of the stone did indeed clean the concrete - especially so since in those days towns like Preston were smoke filled and grimy from the millions of chimney pots pouring forth their smoke and dirt but I suspect it was also about giving the house a cared for effect, about giving your humble house a bit of dignity and confirming a personal pride in yourself and your home. Many a child – myself included - on occasions too numerous to count, received a clip round the ear or slapped leg having stepped on the newly stoned door step and thus left a foot print. It was common to see men return home from work and remove their boots and hop over the newly stoned door step lest they incurred the wrath of ‘er at ‘ome!
There was, however, one resident of
Caroline Street who did not abide by the “rules” and the social mores of the
street and she lived immediately next door to us. Ma Woodacre (as she was known
by all) was a law unto herself and whilst not exactly breaking the rules with
gay abandon certainly did her own thing. The result was that it wasn’t so much
that she was considered merely eccentric by my mother and the other local women
– but she was the butt of barbed criticism, whispered venom and no little
interest!
To my young eyes she seemed very
old – indeed, she had a grown up son, Gordon, who was also the recipient of the
street’s bile. Gordon was a rather seedy looking character with a gaunt face
and whispy hair and did not, I learned from the street gossip, have a “proper”
job which was in itself a reason for comment. He seemed to spend his life
emerging from the house, closing the door behind him and scurrying down the
street, always it seemed to me in a bit of a rush and always looking
suspicious. This was the early and mid fifties and as I slowly gained more
understanding of the world I learned that Gordon earned a dubious living by
being a “bookie’s runner”. In those days “off course betting on the horses” was
largely illegal with none of the betting shops that fill our High Streets today.
So placing a bet was a dodgy business performed in smoky bars and dark
alleyways with a local bookmaker – or
“bookie”. The “runner” was employed by the book maker to collect bets and bring
them along to him – and to occasionally distribute winnings. This kept the
“bookie”, who was operating illegally, in the shadows, removed from the person
placing the wager but, of course, the “runner” also had to be careful so that
he too didn’t fall foul of the local Bobby!
It was an everyday news item in the local newspapers that the police had apprehended and fined bookie’s runners; in short, for runners “run ins” with the law were an occupational hazard which probably explained Gordon’s furtive behaviour on emerging from his front door! In Gordon’s case the local criticism was of two kinds: he was judged to be a lazy individual who should “get himself a proper job” by of many of the women in the street, including my mother, and it seemed to me that Gordon was clearly related to the Devil since, I was told, he spent so much time in the many pubs in the area and was involved in this nefarious pursuit of gambling. He was a lost cause and, by association, Gordon’s dubious life style was blamed on his mother, Ma Woodacre. I don’t think that in all the years that we lived next door to the Woodacre’s I ever heard Gordon speak or see him speak to anyone – or indeed do anyone any harm - he just scurried in and out in his creased grey demob suit and occasional trilby hat looking the very epitome of a shady character – a real 1950s “Spiv”!
In
her hands would be a large stone flagon, complete with cork stopper, and a large
stone jug which Mrs Knowles would fill to the brim and as Ma Woodacre walked back
up the street, holding the corked flagon and jug with care one occasionally saw
froth run down the side of the ancient
jug, leaving a trail of drips on the pavement. We were used to the stone
flagons with the cork stopper in those far off days – you could take them along
to the off licence at the corner of the street and get them filled up with
whatever was your tipple. There was also a man who came around each week with
horse and cart selling lemonade and other soft drinks – he, too, would fill up
the flagon. Many families (my own included) had several flagons which were kept
specifically to use as hot water bottles in an age when central heating and
such was unknown to ordinary folk. But the fact that Ma Woodacre seemed to get
hers filled up every night was clear evidence to all and sundry behind the net
curtains of Caroline Street of Ma Woodacre’s debauched and dissolute life style. Then, of course, there was the
associated question: Ma Woodacre did not
work so where did the money come from that subsidised this “life of Riley” as
my mother oft put it? The life style and
finances of the Woodacre household were a regular subject of much speculation
in Caroline Street’s whispered conversations on doorsteps and behind net
curtains. I often heard my mother mutter when gossiping with a neighbour about
Ma Woodacre “It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken” – the meaning, even to my
young ears was clear: good honest folk work hard and do the right things (like
scrubbing the door step with a donkey stone!) but those who weaken and give in
to the deadly sins of the world – greed, idleness, lust and the rest - have an
easy life. In later life I’ve often pondered that my mother’s comment was
almost Biblical recalling, in a way, how Eve “weakened”, given in to temptation,
and ate the apple and then in turn weakened Adam. So sin, and all that went with it, was
born......or so the Bible warned us, and so, too, did my mother so often warn
me!
There were, however, other things
that I can remember. When I played with
my friends in our back yard it was not unusual to smell baking waft from Ma
Woodacre’s kitchen and over the dividing wall and we kids would stand, like the "Bisto kids", soaking up the aroma! On other occasions – especially when we squashed
on my front door step or, if raining, huddled in our tiny vestibule swapping
our picture cards, talking football or pondering the world into which were
growing up, the sound of a piano playing could sometimes be faintly heard
coming from number 16 – and if you were lucky the sound of a voice singing in
accompaniment. I assumed then – and
still do today – that these were hymns, and although a child and no expert,
even to my young ears both the playing and the singing seemed very
professional. If Ma Woodacre was such a dreadful person I often reasoned, how come
she had such a wonderful voice (which I now know was probably a contralto) and
more important, how come she baked such nice smelling cakes!
To me (and my friends) the
Woodacre’s were largely an irrelevance. Excluded, watched with suspicion and
often vilified by our parents – I suppose in today’s terms they would be said
to be “othered”; considered less worthy by those in charge. But to
us to us kids they were never really part
of our world. Unlike Old Mother Nixon who lived alone and opposite or Mr Abbott
who thought he was a cut above the rest of us, neither Ma Woodacre or Gordon
ever came out to complain when we kids played football in the street – a thing
we did endlessly. We only had to emerge from our homes with a football and Old
Mother Nixon would be at her front door waving her walking stick before we had
even put down our coats as goalposts or a ball had been kicked. “Clear off you
little b*****s go an ‘brek’ some b****r else’s winders” she would shout in a
voice so loud it seemed impossible to come from such a small frame! We, of
course, laughed and ignored her but whatever we did outside number 16 the
Woodacre’s front door remained firmly closed, its peeling paintwork and grubby
doorstep like the entrance to some ancient forbidding and forbidden
dungeon............................ until, that is, one hot summer’s day in
1955.
The long, hot and very dry summer
of 1955 still stands in the record books as one of the UK’s great heat waves. I
still remember those school holidays endlessly playing cricket against the
doors of newsagent Joe Unsworth’s row of lock up garages, swimming in the
outdoor swimming pool on Waverley Park and making tents out of my dad’s old
army blankets in our little back yard and in the process ruining the blankets
by hammering six inch nails from my dad’s shed through the blankets and into
the gaps between the flags to secure the blankets to the ground! And, on one of
those long hot days something new happened in Caroline Street: Ma Woodacre’s
front door was left ajar! But not only that, hanging in the tiny vestibule,
visible to the outside world, was a gloriously gilded cage – which to our young
eyes looked like gold! – and perched in the cage was a brilliantly coloured
parrot. Behind the cage one could see into the Woodacre’s front room – a place
of mystery never seen before. My pal Nebber (his real name was Tony but
everyone called him Nebber because he often wore a flat cap with a “neb” – a
peak – on it) and I stood mesmerised by both the bird and what lay behind it –
it was to us like the entry to some Aladdin’s cave.
“Can he say anything else Mrs?”
“Didn’t know you had a parrot Ma”.
“Can he fly”
“Is he new?”
“Can I stroke him?”
“How old is he?”
Ma Woodacre smiled again and disappeared into the dungeon which was in semi darkness, the curtains being drawn to keep out the sun’s glare and presumably to keep the place cool in the heat wave. We stood gazing at the parrot and stuck our fingers through the bars; the bird remained impassive. Moments later the woman returned with a slice of apple in her hand. She pushed the apple in between the bars of the cage and Peter the parrot leapt into action scuttling along his perch and pecking away at the tasty morsel – and as he did so the cage swayed back and forth on the chain which was attached to a huge hook in the ceiling of the vestibule. The apple having disappeared, Ma Woodacre produced another small piece and gave it to Nebber “Be careful” she said, “Don’t frit him”. Nebber pushed the piece of apple through the wires and the bird leapt onto the wires, its claws wrapping themselves around them and its body pressed against them as it pecked at the apple which Nebber was holding. As the bird pecked at the apple Nebber stroked its feathered breast which was pressed against the wires of the cage. That, of course was a signal for me to have a go – and Ma Woodacre allowed both of us to hold a small slice of fruit up for the bird while Peter, presumably thought he was in some kind of parrot heaven – the centre of attention and gorging himself in the afternoon sunshine of Caroline Street recalling, perhaps, primeval memories of his ancient ancestors who had pecked at fruit in the sunshine of luscious Caribbean Islands or exotic African shores. And while he gorged, we two townie kids, offspring of Clement Attlee’s “New Jerusalem”, born into the mean streets of Blake’s “Dark satanic mills” stood transfixed and lost for words at this enchanting discovery behind the Woodacre’s peeling front door.
As the summer temperature rocketed, as it seemed to do every day, Peter was hung out to enjoy the sun and Nebber and me fed him – usually from tit bits supplied by Ma Woodacre but, often too with the contents of our own pockets – bits of chocolate, licks of ice lollies, biscuits and crusts from our own larders. The poor bird must have longed for some peace and quiet from the faces pressed to his cage or the finger tips poked into his gilded home. He learned to squawk back at us “Peter, Peter, Peter” and today, as I think back, I wonder if, in the quiet of Ma Woodacre’s front parlour he pondered the new vocabulary he might have heard as he gazed out on the narrow sunlit street: “Owzat!”, “Goal!”, “LBW”, “Foul” or “Clear off you little b*****s go an ‘brek’ some b****r else’s winders”!
Through it all Gordon Woodacre came and went, rarely, if ever acknowledging us kids as we took every opportunity of gaining Peter the parrot’s attention. Ma Woodacre, however was different. We still only rarely saw her go shopping and never enter into the social life of the street. Her front door remained closed grimy as always except for those long hot afternoons when some fresh air was allowed to ventilate her tiny house via the open door. Our daily visits to see the parrot developed into invites into her front room – but never further. And what a magical world it seemed to us. The tiny room – a reflection of my own front room next door - was filled with huge, heavy dark furniture and two ancient but, even to my eyes, well cared for chairs and a small settee and in the alcove an ornate and ancient piano complete with candle sticks. On the heavily patterned wallpaper hung ancient paintings and sepia photographs depicting long gone men with moustaches and side whiskers and women in long dresses and bonnets all looking rather grim and surrounded by groups of well scrubbed serious looking children all in their Sunday best. The curtains and lamp shades all seemed to have tassels and an old iron range - black and highly polished – filled the chimney breast. The room was so full that there seemed no room to move around and this was made worse by Ma Woodacre – not a small woman but whose faded, heavily floral patterned frocks and wrap around pinny, so much favoured by Lancashire women of that generation, seemed to make her into some kind of mobile barrage balloon that drifted between the tightly packed furniture, the antimacassars and the pot plants that covered the polished furniture’s surfaces. I can remember wondering about the mismatch between the house’s inside and its outside. Outside was grimy, the paintwork peeling and it oozed a general lack of care and maintenance, no donkey stoned scrubbed step to relieve the dilapidated frontage. In many respects all the houses in the streets looked in need of tender loving care – they were all, I assume, rented like ours and in those post war days DIY or landlords keeping their property in good repair was not the highest of priorities. But externally number 16 was several steps down the ladder so far as any good housekeeping certificate was concerned. Inside, however, it was different; although old fashioned I recognised that it was well cared for and clearly a source of pride. Although full to capacity with “stuff” it was spotlessly clean, oil cloth shining and surfaces polished – the only exception to that being a shelf in the other chimney breast alcove which was scattered with bird seed – obviously Peter the Parrot’s place of residence when his cage was not hanging in the afternoon sun of the vestibule. And, into this Aladdin’s Cave would sweep Ma Woodacre carrying mugs and the stoneware jug that I had seen her with on her nightly trip to the off licence. She would fill our mugs with sparkling lemonade or dandelion and burdock and then appear with a plate of biscuits which Nebber and I would soon demolish.
Between feeding Peter the parrot and occasionally being allowed to ease our hands through the open cage door to stroke his head we slowly, visit by visit, piece by piece, learned that Ma Woodacre had always lived in the house – she had been born there almost 70 years before. Her husband, Harold, had died in the 1917 hell of Passchendaele, a year or two after they had married half way through the Great War – Gordon was the son he never saw. Harold, she told us, had no grave, his body had never been found in Passchendaele’s mud and he was commemorated, she said, at the war memorial there. She had never visited the memorial in Belgium, perhaps she couldn’t afford it, and in those days, I suppose, Belgium was a world away for a working class widowed woman with a young child. She did, however, each year, on his birthday, on the anniversary of his death and on Armistice Day visit the war memorial in Preston’s cemetery where, she said, his name was listed. Preston’s cemetery in New Hall Lane is only a 10 minute walk from Caroline Street – my own grandparents, great grandparents, and many aunts and uncles are buried there.
One day she took down a faded photograph from the piano and showed it to us; a young, pale faced, woman in a white dress, holding a small bouquet and standing beside a uniformed man. The young, clean shaven man, hair smoothed down in the fashion of the day, was a soldier, standing upright, almost to attention, proud in his smartly done up uniform with its shining buttons, his lower legs encased in what I knew were the puttees worn by soldiers in the Great War, his boots shining brightly. On his arm one could see two stripes denoting that he was a corporal and under that arm he held his cap and the woman linked her arm through his other arm; they stood straight, upright, looking ahead as if to the future and what it held for them. This was their wedding day; and the wrinkled matronly woman in front of us in her flowered pinny was that same person who had stood, a lifetime ago, for this posed photograph: slim, pretty, demure, the hint of a smile on her face at the side of her brave soldier boy, Harold, Gordon’s father who had left his pretty young wife to go off to war, never to return. As we looked we both knew that we did not have the words to express what should be said, we were just two scruffy kids and could say nothing appropriate to the old woman, so we just mumbled embarrassed pleasantries while Ma Woodacre breathed on the glass of the photo and wiped it with her sleeve to remove our finger prints, and then replaced it on the top of the piano. We also learned that Ma Woodacre was teetotal and always had been so. Brought up a strict Methodist she had never, she told us, “took a drop”. Nebber, never one to hold back, and having heard that waded in “Does Gordon drink all the beer you get at Mrs Knowles’ every night then, everybody sez he’s a drunkard?” The woman smiled and replied “Nay lad, he’s teetotal as well – he might go into yon pubs but he doesn’t drink, it’d be more than his life’s worth, I can tell thee! It’s only lemonade and dandelion and burdock that I bring back from Kitty Knowles’ corner shop. Folk can think what they like about me and our Gordon, it’s up to them” And we sat, lips wet and sweet with the sugar from the lemonade or dandelion and burdock, biscuit crumbs scattered at our feet, perplexed at this woman who was not what we thought at all.
She would ask us about ourselves, what our dads did for a living, where our mothers worked, what we learned at school, what we were going to do when we grew up. She herself had worked in the cotton mills like my mother and aunties but as a cotton spinner (my mother and aunties were weavers) at the local spinning mill, Paul Catterall’s, just around the corner from Caroline Street. Harold, before going off to war, had been a tackler at the same mill; my uncle Joe was a tackler, one of the men that kept the looms and the spinning machines running.
While thinking about this writing I
found a wonderful old photograph showing a decorative float made by the Paul
Catterall mill for the 1922 Preston Guild processions. Preston has had Guild celebrations
since in 1179 when King Henry II awarded Preston its first royal charter. At
the Guild all the local companies, churches, clubs, societies, brass bands, etc.
parade and show their “wares”; there is a fairground, great pageants, schools
put on displays. The whole thing lasts for 2 weeks once every 20 years. Each
and every day is filled with parades, processions and civic events. As I looked
at the old photograph of the Paul Catterall 1922 Guild float I realised that Ma
Woodacre could easily have been on this photograph standing in front of the
bobbins of cotton thread piled high to make a pyramid. Certainly, I guess if
she were still alive today she would be able to point to the people in the
photograph and recognise each and every one. All part of life’s rich tapestry, but
times change, the world moves on. When the photograph was taken in 1922 Preston
had 60 cotton weaving and spinning mills, like a Lowry painting the Preston
skyline then - and when I was a child - was filled with tall factory chimneys
reaching, it seemed, up to the clouds and pouring forth their smoke, and the
narrow Preston streets were filled with Lowry type figures making their way to
and from “t’mill”. According to my internet search the Paul Catterall mill was
producing over 42000 bobbins of cotton thread a day in 1922 to feed the looms
in the world’s great weaving mills like Horrockses where my mother and aunties worked;
when, as my Auntie Edna frequently reminded me as a child, “England’s bread hung
by Lancashire’s thread!”
In the 1952 Guild (there was no
Guild celebration in 1942 because of the war) I had been dressed in tin foil as
one of hundreds of school boy St Georges, each carrying tin foil swords and
shields and following a great exotically painted (and not very fierce looking)
dragon through Preston’s town centre, the pavements full of cheering, flag
waving Prestonians who had been there since early morning to get a good view! In that same 1952 Guild my dad had driven his green
lorry, brightly polished with tyres painted white and on the back of his lorry
was the huge fuselage of the Canberra bomber which was made by his company,
English Electric, in Preston; the UK was still, in those days, a great
industrial manufacturing nation and had risen from the ashes of war – Clement Attlee’s
“New Jerusalem” had arrived.
And so that long hot summer came to an end and we returned to school. As the August heat descended into early Autumn’s chill Peter the parrot returned to his shelf in the alcove of Ma Woodacre’s front room and the front door remained shut. Only Gordon emerging, furtive as always scuttling down the street, eyes darting this way and that – a man on a mission. Ma Woodacre continued to keep herself to herself and the tongues of Caroline Street continued to wag. Nebber and I rarely spoke of our talks with Ma Woodacre – the world moved on and we grew up. I don’t know about Nebber but I never told my mum or dad of our visits into Ma Woodacre’s front room, or of the biscuits and the drinks of lemonade and dandelion and burdock. So strongly did my mother hold her views (as indeed did other women of the street) that as with many things in my childhood I felt then (and still today) that it was not worth the potential “pain” to open the wound. My mother was not a woman to be trifled with and to suggest to her that Ma Woodacre was really quite a nice, kind old lady, with a lovely parrot and that she was not a drunkard but gave us mugs of pop and biscuits would, I fear, have been too much; it would, to coin a phrase, have all ended in tears - mine. It was one of those things about which the less said, the better – like my trips to swim in the River Ribble with my pals, or the games of football and cricket that I enjoyed with my pals Nebber and Gary in the garden of St Joseph’s the local Roman Catholic Church and which were organised by the young priests in the seminary of the Church. The Roman Catholic religion was, to my mother, just one step away from Satanism so deep was her dislike of “them damn Papists”. They were, according to my mother, just like the Irish who she hated with equal measure and who, she often told me, “would overrun us all”. In all these things, and others, as a child and a teenager (and later adult) I felt it wiser to say nothing. I never understood my mother’s venom, outlook on life and what we now call prejudice, so while she laboured at her looms in Horrockses’ cotton mill I felt it wiser to find out more about the world in my own way and keep my thoughts to myself. The alternative was too painful to contemplate. I loved my mother dearly, and she too loved me with a fierce and overwhelming passion, but I also knew then, and did so until the day that she died, that when her views were challenged her venom, intolerance and prejudice could know no bounds.
As I grew into my teenage years my world widened away from the street but a few months after we first met Peter the parrot, Caroline Street found more evidence of the “goings on” at number 16 to confirm their suspicions and prejudices. Out of the blue a young woman began entering and leaving the house. The word on the street was that her name was Eva and that she was “Gordon Woodacre’s fancy woman”. How this was known I have no idea but it wasn’t long before she was cast as some latter day Jezebel – and openly referred to as “the scrubber” or “Gordon Woodacre’s tart”. This, of course, was the 1950s when a different moral and social framework operated but when it became obvious that Eva had moved in and was living at number 16 the gossip went into overdrive and the outrage became tangible. My mother felt that as this scandalous coven lived next door to us we – and especially I – were in danger of being forever “tarred with the same brush”. It wasn’t long before a number of the women of the street – Mrs Dean, Mrs Graveson, Mrs Grimshaw and my mother (and probably others too) took it upon themselves to complain to the local constabulary about the “goings on” at the Woodacre’s. A letter was composed by the women sitting around our little back kitchen table, my mother, who wrote well, being the scribe. The police acknowledged the letter and said that they noted the complaint but to my mother’s chagrin, did nothing. And I wondered; I was now old enough to understand the subtext and could not prevent myself asking the question “Is there another side to this story?” – but, of course, I never voiced my concern. We would never know, however, because after a month or two Eva moved out, the world moved on and the street returned to its quiet prejudices and hypocrisies.
Ma Woodacre was not what it seemed on the outside and she made no effort to correct that. Others, therefore, just assumed the worst while this old lady for whatever reason just wanted to live her life behind her closed and grimy front door. To us kids she was an old woman who seemed to live a bit of a strange life – maybe today we might say she was a bit of a Bohemian or she did her own thing. Indeed, a decade down the line, by 1966, the Beatles were doing their thing and living the Bohemian lifestyle of Sergeant Pepper and the summer of flower power and free love was mainstream. By then, maybe, Ma Woodacre would have been more easily accepted – and, of course, by then Gordon may well have had to get “proper job” because “off course betting” was by then legal – the days of the bookie’s runner were over! And as for the evil Eva the potential corruptor of teenage boys, her indiscretions would have looked small beer, almost saintly, when compared with the Profumo Affair scandals and lifestyles of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies the unseemly and lascivious details of which filled the front pages of my mother’s 1960’s Daily Mirror, Sunday Express and News of the World and which she devoured daily with an indecent gusto. Times had moved on, and so had I; by 1965 I had left Preston and was living in Nottingham and my mother and dad had left Caroline Street to live in a small village 10 miles away from Preston. I never saw or heard of Ma Woodacre again.
We kids realised it at the time; Ma Woodacre wasn’t odd, mad or bad – and I certainly knew that she wasn’t how my mother painted her. She was just an old lady who wanted to live privately in the only world that she had perhaps ever known – the world that she had made for herself and her son after the tragic loss of her husband. Of course, at that age we didn’t think of her in those terms, to us she was just a rather strange and mysterious old woman who gave us biscuits, lemonade to drink and had a wonderful pet; we were innocent, and looked no deeper than that. But today, in our world which has lost so much of its innocence, I often wonder if we have, as a society, lost so much else; we look for danger around every corner, believe that the world is full of people who would cheat us or harm our children, we are habitually cynical about those in power and words like paedophile, pervert, benefits cheat, scrounger fall easily from many lips and are the common currency of social media and our tabloid press. Just as in 1955, difference still promotes alienation and too often hatred. Have we really come very far? Five minutes spent on social media or listening to some of our own leading politicians, and even the President of the United States soon convinces me that although we have made huge strides in our clever technology, our lack of common humanity, tolerance and love for our fellow man hasn’t changed much and has, maybe, even deteriorated further.
And Ma Woodacre? – just and eccentric, an odd ball, or a dissolute old woman, with no pride in her house, “common as muck”, a scrounger living off her drunken son’s immoral earnings as the women of Caroline Street painted her...... who knows? Maybe, her priorities were different; maybe the sepia photographs in her front room told a story of a hard or tragic life, maybe the old furniture that had been part of her life since she had been born was a bit of security for her. Maybe she had a war pension from her dead husband Harold and just wanted to live with her memories, maybe she had secrets that she wished to keep close to her, maybe there were aspects of her life (and her son) that she did not wish to share or to be the common gossip of the street. Whatever, the social mores of the time didn’t have an algorithm to take account of all that. For whatever reason, Ma Woodacre didn’t fit the mould or the expectations of the others in the street and she suffered for it. She lived her life on her terms but was a victim of that and of her circumstances, of the zeitgeist of the age, and the social expectations and prejudices of the place.
Harold’s military details told me
that had been promoted since the ancient photograph on Ma Woodacre’s front room
of him and his young bride on their wedding day; he had died a sergeant with three stripes on his arm. And wonderfully and yet tragically he was
awarded the Military Medal, his gallantry mentioned in Despatches. In
short, Ma Woodacre’s Harold was not just a soldier or even just a dead soldier. He was a hero, a gallant warrior that his King and his nation had saluted and
acknowledged for his bravery by awarding him one of the nation’s highest and
greatest awards for bravery in action. The Military Medal, established in 1916,
is awarded to Non-Commissioned Officers for "acts of gallantry and
devotion to duty under fire". Ma Woodacre chose never to tell us
kids that – how Nebber and I would have been impressed by that! Surely, we would have asked to see the medal; but no, she kept it
to herself, something, perhaps, precious to her alone, something she wished to
keep close, something taken from a drawer and looked at on his birthday or on their
wedding anniversary perhaps. In a harsh world was this her little bit of
sustenance as she grew older? How strange and unfathomable is the human
condition. I wonder if the gossips of Caroline Street ever knew of this? And if
they had, would it have made their views any less harsh? Would Ma Woodacre have
been forgiven for not donkey stoning her front door step or for enjoying her
nightly glass of lemonade or dandelion and burdock? Would Gordon, the son of a
hero who had never seen his gallant father, have been viewed a little more
kindly – respectfully even, for surely he deserved that as the son of a
hero? And his mother, the widowed wife of
a hero; would she have been extended the friendship and graciousness that she
was undeniably due? Would the tongues have wagged a little less? Would Ma
Woodacre have been forgiven her perceived housekeeping sins? I wonder, I wonder; or is the reality of
mankind such that, as the great philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in
1784, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever
made."
Harold Woodacre’s entry in the Tyne Cot War Memorial List needs no explanation. Scanned above is the entry in the War Graves Memorial Book. The words say it all. Just a very few words recording the life and death of an ordinary, uneducated mill worker who became a hero, and in the heat of one of the most terrible battles in the history of the world was obliterated. The few words do not tell us that he left a wife and son who crossed my path and in a small way many years later. They do not tell how they influenced me as I grew up and how they helped form what I now believe in as an eighty year old. Now, a century after the dreadful events of the Great War and the Battles of Ypres and Passchendaele when Harold Woodacre died so gallantly for his country, his young family and, indeed, his neighbours I am grateful for those summer afternoons in Ma Woodacre’s parlour sipping dandelion and burdock with Nebber. It is a sad, indeed terrible, indictment upon mankind and upon his widowed wife's neighbours that those same Caroline Street neighbours for whom he had died, in later years vilified his wife and son.
We two kids had been privileged in that long hot summer to be invited into Ma Woodacre’s world for just for a few minutes every few days. Why she opened up to us we would never know but because we had that opportunity, and with the passing of time, those long gone minutes feeding Peter the parrot, drinking dandelion and burdock and peeping into the world of this old woman have given me more than just a good memory; I also learned something about people, and of the world that I was growing up into. When, ten years after these events took place, as a trainee teacher at college in Nottingham I first read Harper Lee’s powerful and moving tale of racial prejudice and hate in “To kill a Mockingbird” the mighty words of lawyer Atticus Finch leapt off the page at me. I can still remember thinking then of Ma Woodacre, of her parrot and of dandelion and burdock. "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it…." Finch tells his young daughter Scout as he strives to explain to her the nature and the roots of empathy. In today's world of racial tensions, populist hate filled rhetoric about refugees and asylum seekers, the vilification of people of other faiths or orientation, or “others” who simply do not fit in with society’s perception of what is “normal” empathy, I increasingly believe, is in short supply. Indeed, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, earlier this year told us that "the biggest weakness of the western world was empathy" . The good housewives of Caroline Street, Preston in 1955 certainly would not have heeded Finch's advice; none had a mind to "climb into Ma Woodacre's skin" and see her world, and know of what had gone before to make it so. Had they taken this leap into the unknown then they might have found themselves and their prejudices wanting - and I don't think anyone of them would have liked what they saw in themselves. Perhaps that is why, still today, prejudice remains with us, to acknowledge it is to expose our own shortcomings and unpleasant innermost aspects.
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