Personal Memoirs
Post two
I must have been a fairly healthy and happy baby for I remember my parents telling me how my uncles, and I had plenty of them, used to toss me up to the ceiling and catch me much to my delight. It was a good thing I was so because my older sister, Eleanor, was what is now called a “Blue Baby”, so my mother had plenty of caring for her. Consequently, I was happy enough to be in my cradle without much notice except for the routine care of a baby.
As I grew older the walks with my father I remember most – on Sundays he used to take us up Sugarwell Hill – I think that was the name, but I don’t quite remember. It was a lovely walk-through fields of wheat with corn flowers and poppies abounding in them. Years later, I found a piece of Liberty Lawn (cotton material) with corn flowers and poppies and I bought it for a dress. I always loved that dress.
We were living in Leeds at the time. My father being general manager of the Patent Woolen Felt Co. We lived in a house on a private road with gates that were shut at night. A lovely garden was in front, and I remember my father having his table set up for chess with a friend of his.
Meanwhile, we children, I had another sister, Edna, younger than I was, we used to play shuttlecock in the spacious hall. Nearby lived a little boy named Charlie, who lived with his aunts. I don’t remember whether he was an orphan, or his parents were in India, as many people were then, but his aunts were very strict with him and it was a record of our being properly brought up that he was allowed to play with us. At home, he had to do
things that to us seemed incredible for a boy who, to us, should be playing cricket etc, that he had to learn to crochet. One day he brought me a necklace he had crocheted. I wore it for quite a time.
While we lived in Lancashire, we went to Kent’s Bank for our summer holiday. It was a lovely place near Grange with only three or four houses. The one my father rented for us was a sort of farm near the sea and surrounded by a plantation. The woman of the house took care of us and made us delicious meals, particularly scones, which were so big and fat that we called them “Fat Rascals” — full of currants, they were. I remember that later when we were home again and going to church, how we used to laugh and giggle in our high walled pew, because we called our thick prayer book a “fat rascal”. It was at Kent’s Bank that Edna asked the farmer which cow gave the buttermilk? It was always a source of amusement to us.
One day while at Kent’s Bank, we decided to have a millinery shop and collected rhubarb leaves and dock leaves and I trimmed them with flowers, and I picked some beautiful flowers that I had never seen before, and made a lovely hat. Later in the day, the farmer came into the house and asked who had picked the blossoms of his melons. How ashamed I was to have robbed him of his melons, and with what chagrin I thought of my creation with his flowers.
My brother, Oliver, went to the Middle Class School in Leeds. This was a private school, and my father was very particular that Oliver should come home promptly. We were all to be at home when he arrived for dinner. One day Oliver did not come in time
for dinner, and he didn’t come until we could see the rage building up in my father’s face. It was very dark when he arrived, and my father was ready with his cane and gave him such a trouncing that we girls went into the closet where we couldn’t hear Oliver cry. But, of course, he didn’t cry. It was dreadful when we went to bed crying and feeling sorry. Then Oliver came upstairs and got ready for bed – but before he went, he came to my room and asked me to see his back, if there were any cuts on it. There were many dark red welts, oh, how sorry I was. But the next day, my father told my mother that if there was to be any more whippings, she would have to do it because he couldn’t.
Post one
When we lived in Yorkshire, we took our summer holidays at Land’s End, near Whitby. It was a lovely, quiet spot about 6 miles north of Whitby. My father took his bicycle early in the summer and rode to the place to find a suitable lodging for us all. He found a nice old farmhouse where the wife was willing to take care of us all and provide the meals (no small job, I am thinking) So we went away for the month of August. We had a beautiful holiday.
Of course, we girls were not allowed to go swimming, but we could go paddling, that is we waded in the water. Father and Oliver went swimming. In the afternoon we took long walks on the moors around, sometimes to Robin Hood’s Bay where Captain Cook grew up and came to fame sailing around the world and discovering Australia. Other days we went to Whitby to see the Abbey where the Abbess Hilda drove the snakes into the sea after they had molested the inhabitants of Whitby and terrorized them. We used to search for the fossils with snakes imprinted on them. A legend has it that the fossils with snakes imprinted on them are the snakes that St Hilda commanded to return to the sea.
While living in Lancashire, we spent our holidays in the Lake District or at Grande over Sands. Both places we just loved as we lived as we did, with the farmer and his wife, so all of us were free to go to all the interesting places around. It seemed that all the places my father took us to in the Lake District were so very beautiful. I can’t think of any one special. Only that when 50 years later with Janet and Nancy, I was so shocked to see all the tents along the banks of the Windemere that it spoiled the memories for me.
At Grange Over Sands, we really had a wonderful summer, and the place where we lived was beautiful, with a lovely garden surrounded by a stone wall. I remember one day we planned to have a Milliner’s Shop. You had to be very careful of the sands at Grange. They were quicksand, and tales were told of ponies and carts that were swallowed up in them.
At Christmas time, we had jolly times giving plays, having parties, and all the fun things of Christmas. It was about this time we had a series of, I suppose you would call them charades, but they were supposed to represent pictures. One was “Lost in the Snow” and another “Bubbles” and a third “A Dirty Boy”. Of course, Oliver was supposed to be the dirty boy, but he wouldn’t do it – so they said I should. I was looked over, found with dirty ears and given a good scrubbing, then my mother used to insist on our giving toys to the poor. Not old toys, but something we had received for Christmas. It made a hard choice, but I think it was a good thing because it taught us to share.
Also, in the holidays came the New Year, and it was then that a very dark man had to bring in the New Year, and we were lucky to have a man working for Father who was very dark, had no children to hamper over the New Year, so each year, just at midnight, he came knocking on our door and wished us all “A very happy and prosperous New Year”. He came in and we had a little New Year’s party. The men with a drink of some kind and we children with hot chocolate and cookies to celebrate. I wonder if this old custom is kept up nowadays. It seems a long time since I have heard of it.
When I was about nine years old, my father bought a mill in Lancaster, and we lived there for three years. I remember the Christmas parties we used to have with uncles and aunts and cousins. Christmas at my grandfather Holts, New Year’s at our house, and the next weekend at my uncle George Taylor. Sometimes we missed the last train and had to be “tossed up” in make-shift beds but we thought it was fun. It was while living in Lancashire that my grandfather Stansfield died. He was living in America at the time and my father had funeral services celebrated at Hokum Tower where his family were buried. All his family and friends attended.(Years later I went with Claude to see Hokum Tower.)
Not long after this I found out that our family was going to America to live. My father being the oldest son was persuaded by his mother to take over the mills my Grandfather had in Amsterdam, New York. There was much excitement in the village at the news. I remember my father had huge crates made to pack our household things – we brought everything – piano and everything that is except a beautiful old Queen Anne Lady’s chair which needed repairing. I always wished we had brought it with us. Also, my father brought some machinery he had bought in Germany when he went there, and so we had the hold of the ship pretty well filled with our stuff and so got preferential treatment on the ship from the crew. If it was a good day on one side of the deck, we played on that side. If on the other side, we played on that side, no matter what the other passengers said or did.
Besides filling up the hold with our crates, my father brought and paid for the passage of my uncle and his wife and four children, and the machinist Bob Smith and his wife and his six children, so you see why we had favors from the crew staff of the ship. One thing I remember is that my mother asked me to clean our lovely old copper kettle. I don’t know why I didn’t do it, but I suppose it was because I wasn’t in the habit of doing that kind of thing – but when we arrived in Amsterdam, I noticed the absence of the tea kettle and asked where it was – my mother replied “but you never cleaned it”. I always thought that, but for me, we would have had our nice old kettle, especially when in later years, Janet came home from Europe with pans and skillets of copper.
We sailed on the S.S. Arabic on her maiden voyage, and it was a beautiful ship. I remember on our approach to New York, I was looking to see if I could see New York when all of a sudden there it was, and I looked to tell my family, and I was surrounded by strangers. But anyway, I saw it first, and the Statue of Liberty, but what did the Statue of Liberty mean to me – nothing but New York until years later.
Uncle George and auntie Bertha, my father’s brother, met us at the wharf. After we got our baggage settled, they took us to have dinner, and I remember how uncle George had ordered corn on the cob for us to see what we would do with it, then, huge pieces of water melon. Of course, we had watermelon in England, but it was much smaller. I suppose it must have been honey dew. After dinner, we all, that is my family, went to Philadelphia to stay with uncle George and auntie Bertha. We stayed there for about two months while father and Oliver went to Amsterdam to buy a house and mother and auntie Bertha went shopping in Philadelphia to get extras for the house.
